


Drift Mechanics

by speccygeekgrrl



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Drift Bond, F/M, Ghost Drifting, Original Character(s), POV Original Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-24
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-01-05 20:34:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 28,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1098326
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/speccygeekgrrl/pseuds/speccygeekgrrl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Avery knows she'll be a fantastic Jaeger pilot, as soon as she can find someone she can Drift with. The fact that she's failed every time she's attempted to Drift is just a complication. Severin writes the code for the Jaeger AI, if anyone can get her Drifting, he can. It's just going to take a little tweaking, right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Drift Mechanics

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in Sydney in 2018. I tried to keep it canon-compliant with Pacific Rim, but it doesn't have any of the characters from the movie as anything except side references. (It's really hard to tag original fiction set in fandom universes...)

“Neural handshake failed. Would you like to try again?” the Jaeger A.I. says. Avery sags, letting her head hang backwards, staring at the ceiling of the training module. Again? What an awful joke.

“Maybe next time,” Hannah says, and Avery snorts soundlessly. The techs come in to unhook them from the apparatus, and as soon as Avery’s out of the drivesuit, she takes off, stalking through the halls of the Shatterdome, chewing on the inside of her cheek to keep herself from breaking into embarrassed tears. No one she passes knows she’s just come from another failure, but it feels like there are eyes on her through the narrow halls.

The thing is, she _knows_ someone is out there who can make her dreams come true. There’s someone, there has to be someone, who is Drift compatible with her, there is someone who will be her key to finally piloting a Jaeger of her own. There is someone with whom she will become a force to be reckoned.

There’s someone out there, only every time she’s gotten into the training module with someone, they can’t get into sync. This is the eighth person she’s failed to Drift with. They’re going to give up on her any day now, she knows.

It’s a rare thing to be Drift compatible with someone. Most Jaeger co-pilots are relatives or couples. Some people just never find someone they match up with, no matter how good they’d be at piloting a Jaeger if they could only Drift.

She doesn’t think she’s one of those people, though. She knows there’s someone out there. She just doesn’t know who they are, what they look like, whether they have ever considered piloting a Jaeger, or if she’ll ever meet them, at this point.

Her path takes her through the Jaeger bays, and the group of people in one of the unused bays draws her attention. A new batch of recruits, some bright-eyed kids, some hardened adults. A few are scientists; most probably want to be pilots. She slips in off to the side while they start orientation, leaning against the wall, searching each face-- _are you the one? maybe you?_

Some of them are clearly already matched up-- those dark-haired boys with the same nose and too many muscles between the two of them have got to be brothers, this blonde lady and that Asian man already move in sync with each other. Only one of them looks back at her, a redheaded guy who looks too skinny to be in the pilot program, but he holds her gaze fearlessly, not smiling, not frowning, just looking. Probably a scientist, she figures, but for a moment she lets herself think _maybe you_ , and then the first part of orientation is over and the recruits disperse.

It feels like she passes that redheaded guy by half a dozen times that day, her eyes flicking into a room as she walks by only to find him there. He’s in the infirmary when she walks past, in LOCCENT when she stops in to see what the Breach is doing (nothing, thankfully, the same nothing it has been for weeks), standing against the wall in the kwoon when she goes to work off her energy just a half-step out of sync no matter who she’s sparring.

She notices him again in the mess hall later that day. There are few enough redheads in this Shatterdome that it’s easy to pick them out of the crowd, even in the huge noisy space of the mess hall-- Klaus who works on Echo Saber, Jeanne who rules the infirmary with an iron fist, and this new guy. When she catches herself looking at him without intending to do so, weirdly aware of where he is, she sets her shoulders and stands up. She’s a Jaeger pilot (or will be), the bravest of the brave, and at this point fairly desperate, and there’s got to be a reason her eyes keep tracking to him like a compass needle finding north.

She walks through the ranks of long tables up to the table full of new recruits, and when she’s about a dozen feet away from him he looks over his shoulder like he knows she’s coming. He arches one eyebrow at her, a question or a challenge, she can’t tell but either way she’s going to answer it. “Hi,” she says, “I’m Avery. You’re new here.”

“Yes,” he says, looking her in the eye the way he had on the bay floor. From here she can see that his eyes are green, not like leaves, but like the sky just before a tornado. “You saw me arrive.”

“I saw you a few times today.” She sticks out her hand, trying not to smile too broadly. “Avery Willoughby. I’m a pilot.”

“Not yet,” he says, and her smile freezes. “You don’t have a Jaeger. I know the names of the pilots in this Shatterdome. Willoughby wasn’t on the list.” He's got an accent, something U. K.-ish she can’t immediately put her finger on.

“No. Not yet.” Her hand is still out. Slowly, it curls shut and falls to her side. “So what are you here for? Tech support?”

“In a way. I program the operating system that runs the neural interface.” He pauses, studying her face, and the corners of his lips turn up just slightly. “I tweak the Drift.” The trill on the R brings it home: he’s got to be Scottish. Which she should have guessed, given his coloration.

“Oh. I thought you coders all stayed inland.” Her shoulders slump out of the proud posture she’d walked over with. She didn’t really think he was a pilot, but there was something about him that made her hope, anyways. He tilts his head a fraction of an inch and stands, turning to face her fully.

“Severin Breckenridge. I’ve heard about you, Avery Willoughby. I think I can help you with your Drifting problem.” He offers her his hand, and she doesn’t think twice before clasping it.

\---

What it is that’s caught her notice so totally about this guy, she doesn’t know. It’s not his looks-- the bright red hair stands out, but his face is plain, his nose on the wrong side of too pointy, and his eyes… she meets his gaze boldly, but somewhere in the back of her midwestern mind, she hears tornado sirens every time. It could be his accent, a faint Scottish burr overlaying his quiet voice, so different from the Australian accent prevalent in the Sydney Shatterdome that it stands out to her ears. He’s skinny and he wears his dress shirts buttoned to the throat regardless of how hot it is in the Australian summer and she’s dead certain she’s caught him tripping over air a couple of times, a stumble that never turns into a fall. He’s so pale she doubts whether he’s seen the sun since he started working on Drift technology four years ago (she looked him up, since he seems to know about her already, and he’s younger than he looks and frighteningly brilliant). Not that she’s sporting much of a tan, but she sits on the observation deck at the top of the Shatterdome and gets a little sun now and then, enough to keep her from feeling like she’s wilting under the fluorescents. She has a feeling he’d burn instantly upon exposure to natural light. She’s not entirely certain he isn’t a vampire, actually. He doesn’t seem to sleep on anything approximating a normal schedule, and it shows in the bruise-blue shadows under his eyes.

He settles into his workspace right away; she walks by his office with some regularity whether she means to or not and everything’s out of its box and in its place by the end of day three. He has more computers in his office than any other place in the Shatterdome besides LOCCENT. One whole corner of the room is occupied by neural bridge and Jaeger control apparatus, most of what goes into the simulated conn-pod for the pilot trainees hanging there off his ceiling, and she can’t help the shiver that runs down her spine when she sees the feedback cradles hanging down, wondering when he’s going to plug her in and, what, she doesn’t know. Read her brainwaves? Decode the electricity in her synapses? Take whatever in her is that half-step out of sync with everyone and wrench it into place? She doesn’t know what he’s going to do but she knows herself well enough to know that shiver is completely eagerness and not even a tiny bit fear.

For some reason Avery knows the minute he walks into a room, even when her back is to the door, even when she’s completely preoccupied with other things. She doesn’t have the right words to describe how she knows-- it’s not electric, it doesn’t tingle, the hair on the back of her neck doesn’t stand up, her heart doesn’t race. It’s just something steady and ever so faintly warm that floods through her with the suddenness of a switch being thrown: all at once she knows he is there and something she didn’t know was tense releases with a sigh. It becomes a game she plays with herself, how long until she can keep herself from glancing Severin’s way. At first it’s only seconds, she knows he’s there and immediately she can’t help but look, confirming this weird but entirely certain feeling. It takes a few days for her to stop looking right away, but she’s never wrong about his presence. When she looks immediately, she always catches him looking back at her, but if she waits long enough his attention may turn to someone or something else and she’ll get a long moment to study him without being studied in return.

It’s not that he makes her uncomfortable with his nearly inscrutable expressions, it’s not that she minds him looking at her, it’s just that those tornado-green eyes set off sirens in her head that she can’t decipher. She likes the chance to watch him without his attention on her, to notice the little things that she misses when their eyes lock: his bitten-down fingernails, the silver ring on his right hand that she knows has engraving on it but she’s never been able to see what exactly it is, the way the hole he buckles on his belt is spaced inches away from the next hole, so he must have drilled it himself, Christ he’s skinny, he must weigh next to nothing, he’s probably bony as hell, but she doesn’t know because the only time they’ve touched was that first time they shook hands and she was too surprised by the strength of his grip to notice how spindly his fingers are. He’s not a touchy person, the exact opposite, actually, it always seems like he’s at arm’s length even when he’s right next to her. And she’s not a particularly touchy person either, but she gets the impression that he goes out of his way to make as little physical contact as possible with anyone, ever, at all.

When she looks him up she finds out he has a doctorate in computer programming and another in pure mathematics, but he never mentions this to her, never asks her to call him by his title. She tries it out in her head, tries thinking of him as “Doctor Breckenridge” and can’t quite make it there. Just plain “Breckenridge” is fine when someone else brings him up in conversation, but as much as he always feels like he’s at arm’s length from her, she can’t think of him as anything but Severin. He calls her Willoughby, and she finds it’s easier not to call him anything when she’s speaking to him-- she knows instinctively that he wouldn’t appreciate the familiarity of his given name, and he always pays attention to her without her needing to call him. It’s easier not to say his name out loud, but she says it in her head, thinks of him far more often than she sees him, more often than she should, probably. He doesn’t drive her to distraction, but every so often she’ll be walking and her eyes will flit over to look through a doorway and she’ll catch a glimpse of his red hair, a split second impression of pale skin and crisp white shirt that makes her want to linger.

It doesn’t even take him a full week to start working on what he calls her Drifting problem and what she calls the last roadblock to becoming a hero. At first he just asks her questions (“How many people have you tried Drifting with? Have you chased the RABIT? Have they? What does the neural bridge feel like, is it different with each person, is it painful or uncomfortable or does it feel like anything at all?”) She answers them all as candidly as she can. There have been eight people she failed to Drift with, neural handshake never topping 40 percent. She chased the RABIT, once, into the memory of the car accident that killed her mother and almost killed her, and the other person in the neural handshake couldn’t pull her out of it, they had to shut down the neural bridge manually and she spent the next fourteen hours unconscious in the infirmary. It’s different with everyone, one had sharp edges, one felt watery, one crackled like static electricity, but none of them felt right. None of them worked. Out of the eight people she had failed to Drift with, two went on to find co-pilots, three left the PPDC entirely, one took an officer position and one became a Jaeger tech, and she heard one committed suicide. She never outright tells him she’s terrified that she’d been a waste of funds and training, but he seems to understand that, and his voice softens as she answers his questions. He has data-- every training Drift is recorded and saved, the patterns and spikes and synchronicity, or lack thereof-- and he has her raw honesty and desperation, her full attention, he has the last of her hope held carefully in his thin hands.

“Thank you, Willoughby, I think that will do for today,” he says, and she realizes she’s trembling.

\---

He wasn’t brought in only to fix her problem, although she is more than just a personal project. He spends most of his day writing code, editing it, paring it down and elaborating on it, and after he decides he’s done enough for one day he leaves one computer and rolls up to another and starts analyzing the patterns of Avery’s recorded brainwaves. He can’t tell the shape of a person’s mind from the electricity that sparks through the brain, but he can see the disconnect between her mind and the others’ as clearly as if it were written in English. She’s out of sync with every person she tries to Drift with, but her patterns are familiar to him already, the peaks and valleys of her crackling thoughts a little bit weird next to everyone except the patterns he refuses to compare hers to.

He tests the neural interface programming on himself. It’s expedient, it’s easier than trying to get the information he needs out of a test subject, and he’s only done himself irreparable damage twice in four years. Out of all the brain scans he’s seen, and he’s seen thousands of them, the ones he’s seen the most are his own. He doesn’t code the bridge itself, only the individual uplinks. He gets them to the point of the neural handshake; everything after that comes from the minds of the participants. He’s a programmer, not a pilot; he’s never had a reason to try to Drift with anyone other than sheer curiosity, and curiosity is just another one of the many impulses he ruthlessly suppresses most of the time.

It’s 4:17 a.m. on the twelfth day since he arrived, and Severin traces a fingertip over jagged lines that he’s seen the match to a thousand times before. He can’t be what she _wants_ out of a Drift partner, but he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that right now, he is the best she’s going to get.

\---

It’s two and a half weeks since Severin arrived when he asks her to connect to his neural uplink apparatus, the whole feedback cradle, spinal clamp connection and all. “Seeing your brain without the neural bridge connection will be enlightening,” he says, and she agrees readily. A few people look her askance when she walks through the halls in the under-layer circuitry suit of a battle-ready pilot. It's form-fitting, circuitry reading impulses through the entire suit to flow into the feedback cradle, necessarily sensitive to give the proper interface between pilot and Jaeger, and covering up with a sweatshirt might interfere with the circuits.  She balks for just a moment before putting it on, but she thinks of his shirt buttoned to the throat, buttoned at the cuffs, never even hinting at casual where she’s seen him, and she suits up.

He’s working when she gets to his office, typing furiously, and she watches his slim fingers fly across the keyboard and wonders what they’re forming, what sentence, what fragment of code, what errorless sweep of letters as he never touches the backspace once. He comes to a stop, scans the screen and nods once before looking over at her. “Hello, Willoughby. Come in.”

“I’m ready to connect,” she says, closing the door behind her. “To the computer, I mean. I’ve been trying to connect with a person for a hell of a long time and that is the issue. But I’m ready for that too, whenever it’ll happen.”

“I can’t guarantee that it will,” he says, “but I’ll do my best.” There’s something weird in his gaze when he says that, some intensity she doesn’t know how to read, but she supposes it’s a matter of pride for him now, tweaking the Drift so the undriftable woman can do it after all. “We’re not going to simulate anything today, despite the full neural connection. I’m just going to take readings. All the other data I have for you comes from stressful situations, I’d like to collect a baseline reading.”

“Well, it’s always going to be a stressful moment if I need to Drift with someone,” she says, and catches the corner of his lips turning up a fraction.

“Quite correct. Still, this is information I will need, and it shouldn’t be too tedious for you.”

She bites her cheek to keep from saying anything stupid along the lines of _being with you could never be tedious_ , and steps up to the interface. He comes around to place the spinal clamp and hook her up, and his hands grazing her back as he aligns the feedback cradle are barely-there touches that are still the most physical contact they’ve had since the day they met. She holds her breath and counts the touches-- _three, four, five_ \-- and doesn’t exhale until he steps away. She shifts her balance to the balls of her feet, feels the connection all the way down her back, and closes her eyes.

“Is that all right? You’re not in pain?” He sounds concerned, and she opens her eyes again and flips him half a smile.

“No, I’m fine. I haven’t done this without being fully hooked up to a Jaeger simulator, what’s the difference going to be?”

“This is primarily to collect biometric data. What’s going on in your head, of course, but also the rest of you. The Jaeger coding is done by Doctor Gottlieb, I may send your data on to him if there seems to also be a disconnect between you and the mech.” He types for a moment on one computer, walks a couple of feet and types something else on a different one, and she wonders what is going to happen.

“The Jaeger isn’t the problem. I’m the problem. I could control a Jaeger fine if I could just find someone who can Drift with me, every other time the failure has been mental, not mechanical.”

“Well, it may be mechanical, but not in terms of the Jaeger. I don’t think that’s where the problem is, either, but there’s no reason not to collect the data and check it just in case.” He turns to face her, and the glow of so many computer screens sends the green of his eyes electric. “Are you ready to begin?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be,” she says, and he nods and hits a key and the current runs down her spine and makes her twitch, just once, but enough for him to notice. “So I’m… not going to do anything?”

“I’m afraid this might be boring, but it needn’t last long. Perhaps ten minutes or so.” He peers down at a screen, purses his lips slightly and leaves it alone. She has nothing better to do than watch him, in the sense that she doesn’t have many options and in the sense that if she did have options she’d still rather watch him. He’s the kind of person who’s hard to read, who doesn’t make obvious expressions. She’s never seen him outright smile, or scowl, or look surprised. The corners of his lips are where all the motion happens, a slight quirk upward when he’s pleased, a slight twitch downward when he isn’t. His eyebrows are expressive, if you count curiosity and disbelief as expressions, because those are about all she’s seen them do. She desperately wants to provoke more of a reaction from him, preferably a positive one.

“So how does this Shatterdome compare to wherever you were before?” she asks after enough silence to make her antsy. He looks at her for a moment before snagging his chair from behind his desk and rolling it over to sit in front of her, not directly but slightly to the left.

“It’s rather disorganized. I suppose any Shatterdome would seem disorganized compared to a research facility, there’s so much going on in each one. There are so many more people than I expected when I first entered the complex.” He holds up one hand, three fingers lifted, ticking off the rest and starting again as he speaks. “I knew there were three Jaegers here, but I didn’t realize that each one has so many technicians working on just the mechanical parts. I knew what happens in LOCCENT, but I didn’t think about how many people those tasks require. There’s the whole K-science department. And then there’s support staff for all those people.” He shrugs, letting his hand fall. “I don’t really know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.”

“Had you ever seen a Jaeger up close before you got here? I mean, you’re elbow deep in what makes them work…”

“No, not once. Of course, we had a functional conn-pod for testing purposes, but it wasn’t hooked up to anything. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything made by humans so large that wasn’t a building. The fact that they move… and they move so gracefully… it’s rather astonishing.” The seed of a smile crosses his face. “I’m not looking forward to the next kaiju attack. But I am looking forward to seeing a Jaeger in motion in real life and not just through a recording.”

“It’s really incredible,” Avery says, wistfully. “I’ve wanted to pilot one since they figured out how to make them work. It’s been, what, five years since K-Day? They’re starting to produce Mark 4 Jaegers now. The amount of sheer power contained in a single Jaeger… being in the conn-pod of a Jaeger must be the closest thing to invincible any human being can feel.”

“They’re not invincible, though,” Severin reminds her, “from the outside or the inside. The point of a Jaeger is to fight the kaiju, and sometimes the kaiju win. And the statistics on radiation poisoning of Jaeger pilots… it might be kinder to die at the hands of a kaiju than to waste away from your own cells turning against you.”

“They’re fixing that in the Mark 4 models. No more nuclear reactors. If I-- if you can fix this for me, I could be one of the first people to pilot a Mark 4.” Finally, there’s a clear expression on his face-- horrified fascination. His half-parted lips make her swallow, impossible to look away from, god she hopes that doesn’t spike anything on his readings, not that he would know what caused it anyways. “It doesn’t have to be a suicide mission any more.”

“I’m going to try,” he says, “I’m going to do my damndest to get you in a conn-pod. It’s obvious that this is what you want the most.” He looks like he wants to say something else, but he doesn’t, just studies her face for a moment and looks away. “I think that’s probably enough data to be getting on with.”

“Awesome, unplug me,” she says, and if she’s disappointed that his hands don’t touch anything but the apparatus, at least she’s facing away from him and he can’t catch it. “Thank you,” she says when he tells her she’s free, and then she turns around and says it again, “thank you so much.”

“Don’t thank me yet, Willoughby. Save it until I actually make some headway.” She smiles at him anyways, feeling hope rekindle inside her, and if it doesn’t feel like the same kind of hope she had before, well, she’s not going to tell anyone that.

\---

After that, she’s more deliberate about seeking Severin out. The easiest thing is to find him in the mess hall, except when he doesn’t show up all day and no one has seen him leave his office. The first time she brings him dinner, he’s so focused on his coding that he doesn’t notice she’s there until she’s right next to him, and the startled little yelp he makes is like the aural equivalent of a chocolate truffle. “You can’t afford to skip meals, you’re actually going to fade out of existence,” she tells him, and he scoffs.

“My metabolism is none of your business,” he says, and she stares him down.

“Until you get me Drifting, I’m going to make sure you don’t pass out from low blood sugar and crack that genius brain open on the floor. Eat the cookie too.”

“I don’t like sweets.”

“You haven’t eaten anything today. Eat the fucking cookie.” He glares at her, which for him is pretty expressive, and she stands there with her arms folded until he picks up the fork. “Are you allergic to anything? Hate anything with a passion?”

“Cruciferous vegetables,” he says, prodding at the limp broccoli, “but it’s not an allergy. I was on a roll with a tricky piece of programming, I didn’t realize how much time had passed.” He looks up at her, a little wide-eyed. “How did you know?”

“I’m very observant,” she says with a smirk, not adding the end of that sentence, _when it comes to you_. “At least you’re staying hydrated,” she says, taking notice of the several teabags on a saucer next to his empty mug.

“Tea is not optional,” he informs her, “although it is increasingly difficult to find decent tea these days.”

“You just don’t know how to work the system yet,” she says. “What do you drink? Black? Green?”

“Irish breakfast, mostly,” he says, “the occasional oolong, when I don’t need the caffeine.”

“Duly noted. Are you going to finish it?”

“Not if you insist on hovering over me. Thank you, Willoughby. I’ll even eat the cookie.”

“Damn right you will. See you in the mess hall tomorrow.”

“Yes, all right.”

\---

One week and two delivered meals later, Severin finds a package outside his office door containing three boxes of Twinings Irish breakfast teabags and one box of China oolong. For a change, he seeks Avery out at dinner instead of her finding him, and the moment he smiles at her enough to reveal that he has a dimple on the left side, she stops stock still with her fork halfway to her mouth. “Uh, you’re welcome. Of course. No problem,” she manages to get out after a moment, and he arches one brow curiously at her, not quite sure what’s gotten into her.

\---

"How's it going?" Avery asks, poking her head into his office and finding him with a faint frown and a finger on his computer screen.

"I just received new specifications for the Mark 4 OS and I don't even know where to begin," Severin says. "Half of this contradicts the information I was given last month, part of it can't possibly be correct, and I know they're going to change it more as the construction progresses, so what's the point of me writing code for it as it stands?" He muffles a yawn into one fist and looks at her. "I need to walk away from this for a while, I think."

"I was just heading to the kwoon. You can come spar with me," she jokes, and he aims a dubious look at her. "C'mon, I promise not to beat you too badly."

"Thank you, but no thank you."

"Come watch me spar with someone else, then."

"Perhaps seeing you in motion will shed some light on your problem," he says thoughtfully. He stumbles a little coming around the desk but catches himself with a palm flat on the desktop. Come to think of it, he usually stumbles when he goes from sitting to standing, Avery thinks. It happens more often than not. But he never pauses, and she's never seen him fall. He could just be a little clumsy.

There’s a pilot candidate waiting for her in the kwoon, Harry, one of the ones who came at the same time as Severin. She’s been sparring with each of them, hoping that maybe the next one will be the one she finds a perfect rhythm with. It’s been going even worse lately than it was before, though. Harry is built like a football player, broad and muscular, and his fighting style is direct, artless but powerful. Avery circles him, already knowing he’s not what she’s looking for just by the way he moves. She’s faster than him, lighter on her feet, more careful with her staff. She gets in two hits to his shoulders before his staff makes contact with her, and he’s overenthusiastic, sweeping her feet out from under her and sending her flying. She lands hard on one wrist and swears sharply, bouncing back to her feet and cradling her wrist in her other hand. Severin starts forward without thinking, and she looks at him with wide eyes, stopping him in his tracks.

“Shit, are you okay? Sorry!” Harry leans down to scoop up her staff and offers it to her. “Is it twisted?” She takes it without looking at him and rotates her wrist gingerly.

“No. It’s okay. Hurts, but it’s okay.” She shakes it out, frowning. “No, I’m fine. Let’s keep going.”

Severin puts his back to the wall and stays there for the rest of their sparring session, watching silently as Avery and Harry press each other, finesse against might. Avery lands more blows, barely; not hard ones, as she’s obviously favoring her wrist, but her agility keeps her out of the way of Harry’s strikes. When his staff lands, it’s still too hard, and by the end of their match she’s openly scowling at him.

“You need to practice more,” she says after touching her staff lightly to the side of his head to end a round. “Or only spar with people in your weight class. You need to learn to pull your hits, this kind of sparring is about landing blows, not leaving bruises.”

“Nobody else complains,” Harry says, and she lifts a disdainful eyebrow.

“What, of the ones you came in with? No shit, they’re all as inexperienced as you are.”

“Well, you’ve been doing this for years with how many different people, you should know,” he says, and her knuckles go white around her staff. “Thanks for the practice,” he tosses over his shoulder on his way out.

“Are you all right?” Severin ventures after she just stands there for a minute staring at the door. She scrubs the back of her hand over her eyes before she looks over at him, and the smile on her face is the most artificial expression he’s ever seen her make.

“Yeah. Bruised up a bit. Gonna be feeling this tomorrow.” She replaces her staff with the rest of them and rolls her shoulders. “So. You learn anything?”

“I think so,” he says, holding the door open for her. “We’ll see if it does any good.”

\---

The Jaeger whose operating system he is coding has been tentatively named Hydra Corinthian. It's being built in the heartland of the USA, will be flown to whichever Shatterdome gets it. He thinks it'll probably be Anchorage or Los Angeles, maybe Panama City. There are currently four pilot teams in the entire PPDC who can maintain a neural handshake for longer than a half an hour who aren't assigned to a Jaeger yet. He wants to put Avery on the list, but five weeks in he hasn't found anyone whose neural patterns match hers, except his, and she's never going to get anywhere if she Drifts with him. One of the teams on the list came in with him, the Farrelly brothers, dark-haired and beaky-nosed. He wonders whether they'll be the first Mark 4 pilots, or if it'll be LaRue and Lanphier, or Dearborn and Freeman.

He receives updated specifications every few days, but by now the blueprints are all but finished with the modifications and upgrades. Every Jaeger is different, just like every kaiju is different, every Jaeger has a unique operating system, and the armaments on this one are a bit similar to but not the same as ones found on Coyote Tango and Gipsy Danger. He studies the routines and subroutines from the code from the older Jaegers, and thinks _that's not elegant, I can do that with more elegance_. He doesn't need to make the weapons work-- someone else handles the mechanical code. Severin's job is to make sure that the weapons-- and everything else that is controlled by the minds and motion of the pilots-- can be operated by whoever is hooked up to the feedback cradle.

He thinks he has the harder job. Hardware is hardware, it doesn’t change. Human beings change all the time. Electrical impulses, brain waves, every individual Drift, all different each time a pair of pilots plug in. It’s the AI, the interface between Jaeger and pilots, bridging machine and human, that concerns him, and that’s where the difference between humanity getting stomped into extinction or living to fight to keep living some more lies. The unity of purpose between two linked minds and the greatest machines ever created is what’s giving hope to seven billion people.

For all that he makes piloting a Jaeger possible, he has never once wished to actually pilot one himself. Jaeger pilots are warriors, knights in skyscraper-high shining armor, above all else they are brave, and he knows himself well enough to know that he lacks the necessary qualities to be a pilot. Perhaps for civil rather than military purposes, although a mech for civil purposes would likely be small enough that it wouldn’t require two pilots to handle the neural load. Every once in a while in his dreams he finds himself in a conn-pod, and those dreams are a little less awful than most of the rest of the dreams he has, but when he wakes up he shakes the whole thing off and forgets about it fairly quickly.

When he receives the blueprints labeled “FINAL DRAFT”, Severin doesn’t sleep for 68 hours, plunging right into the guts of the coding and building it from the skeleton outward. He takes a break to pace around his office and stretch his legs every couple of hours, and Avery insists that he isn’t allowed to code while he eats, that he has to at least stop focusing on the programming while she’s in the room with him, and she shows up about every eight hours with whatever she can liberate from the mess hall when she realizes that he’s actually not going to peel himself away from the keyboard in order to eat of his own volition.

He doesn’t realize that she checks up on him every few hours between meals, just poking her head into his office to see if he’s still going, not saying anything when she sees that he’s typing away at furious speed. But when he finally does crash, late into the night on day three, she finds him slumped forward on his folded arms, snoring very quietly every few breaths, desk around him laden with used teabags and half-legible notes. For a couple of moments she just watches him, half smiling to herself, and then she unzips her hoodie and tucks it around his shoulders, letting her hands linger just a heartbeat longer than they should.

She shouldn’t let him sleep all hunched over like that, he’s going to wake up with a crick in his neck and a sore back. But he needs the rest desperately, and she can’t bring herself to wake him even to go lie down. She turns off the light to his office, leaving the room lit by all his silently glowing computer screens, and heads off to get some sleep herself.

\---

“You do know that having gone through Jaeger Academy means you’d automatically start as an officer if you chose a different career path, right?” Marshall Ferrox looks at her over the rim of his glasses. “Plenty of pilot hopefuls staffing J-Tech, a few in K-Science.”

“Yes, sir, I’m aware.”

“You’re approved for training in LOCCENT. Until you have one hundred hours under your belt, if there is a K-event, you are to stay on the sidelines.”

“Pretty used to that, sir.” He arches a brow at her, and she flushes. “Er, sorry, sir.”

“You’re not the only one in the PPDC who had to shift her aspirations down a few notches. Keep that in mind, Willoughby. No matter where you go, you’re not going to be the only person who wanted to be in a Jaeger and didn’t make it.” He shuffles a few papers around and nods. “Everything in order. You’re dismissed.”

“Thank you, sir.” She leaves his office and doesn’t quite know where to go from there. She knows she should be excited about finally getting to do something useful instead of perpetually waiting on the sidelines, but she can’t help feeling disappointed. This is the first step she’s taken away from the dream she’s been aiming at for years. It doesn’t feel like switching tracks, it feels like giving up. She realizes she’s walking toward Echo Saber’s bay and takes a sharp left. The last thing she needs to do right now is see a Jaeger. Better to get out of the Shatterdome entirely for a while. She heads up toward the observation deck. Maybe a little sunlight will do her good.

Of course, the weather doesn’t oblige her. It’s cloudy out, damp enough to show that it’s rained not too long before. It’s getting cooler as the seasons change, and she’s been in Sydney for years but it’s still weird to her that April is autumn, that her birthday is midwinter, that she’s spent so much of her life striving toward one goal that she needs to set aside for good…

 _Severin’s still working on it_ , she reminds herself. He’s still working on her Drifting problem, in between long stretches of work on the OS for Hydra Corinthian. He’s probably working on it instead of sleeping. He could still figure out a solution. If anyone can, he can.

The thought gives her a thread of hope to cling to, but only a thread.

\---

The next time she shows up in his office with food, her shoulder length hair has been clipped down to a pixie cut. His eyes widen, but the only thing he ever says about it is, “It suits you well.”

It makes it harder for her to pull on it, that’s all. Easier to wash. One less thing to think about.

She’s been growing it out since she began pilot training. Time for a change.

\---

For about a week, he’s been making a point of emerging from his office long enough for meals, so on the second day in a row Avery skips every meal, Severin goes to her quarters to find her. She answers the door slowly, and the smile she gives him is a pale imitation of the way she usually looks at him. “You need to eat,” he says gently. She looks awful, even putting it politely-- bloodshot, deeply shadowed blue eyes, sickly pale, slumping against the door frame. “Are you ill?”

“Nah. I’m fine.” Her hair is rumpled, and he knows she’s been running her hands through it compulsively, like she has been since she cut it short. “Just a little tired. It’s been a long couple of days.”

“When was the last time you slept?” She shrugs. “Ate?” Another shrug. He frowns. “Willoughby, did you really think I wouldn’t notice something was wrong with you?”

“Aww, I didn’t know you cared.”

“Sarcasm does not become you. What are you trying to do, turn into me?” That gets a quiet snort from her. “I’m worried about you. Please, at least come eat dinner with me.”

“I don’t… I don’t really want to go to the mess hall. It’s too noisy. My head hurts.”

“Come to my office, then. You’ve fetched me dinner enough times, I can return the favor. And make you a cup of tea.” She wavers visibly, and he throws in a low blow. “I have chocolate.”

“Where did you get chocolate?” He’d be suspicious too, if he were her.

“My sister sent me a care package with two bags of Hershey kisses. I was going to offer you some when you came by my office, and then you didn’t come for days.” It’s only the truth. He doesn’t have to actually say that he missed her, does he? She’ll understand.

“Hold on…” She leaves him in the doorway, and he can’t help peering in. Her walls are plastered with photographs and posters of people, animals, Jaegers, landscapes. The shelf over her desk is full of books, and her bed looks more like a nest than a military-issued bunk. The overall effect is intensely and uniquely Avery, in a building full of cookie-cutter barracks. She pulls on a hooded sweatshirt, pauses to breathe deeply a few times, and turns around with another attempt at a smile, not as weak and unconvincing as the first. “Okay. Let’s go.”

Usually she more than keeps up with his long stride, but today he keeps pulling ahead of her until he sets a hand at the center of her back to keep his pace matched to hers. She looks startled, and he almost withdraws his hand until she leans back into it, glancing at him and looking away at once. Neither of them says a word until she’s settled on her usual chair in his office, and then it’s only to ask her what type of tea she’d prefer.

“Stay here,” he tells her, handing her a painkiller with her mug, and she smirks at him with a hint of her usual spark.

“No place I’d rather be.” When he comes back with grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup, he finds her curled up behind his desk, playing freecell on the computer he’s been using to code the Mark 4 OS, and looking considerably more composed than he left her.

“How did you find that game?”

“You left it open.” He’s certain he didn’t, and he’s equally certain that she’s not going to confess to poking around in his folders, but he just slides her the tray and smiles a little when she makes a pleased sound. He may have had to engage in bribery to get the kitchen to make her comfort food, but he only told her about two of the four bags of chocolate he’d been sent for a reason. His sister knows he doesn’t like sweets, but chocolate is as good as gold in a Shatterdome.

\---

The last of the Mark 3 Jaegers is flown into Sydney Shatterdome on a sunny afternoon. Avery drags Severin out of his office to come watch its approach. The observation deck is crowded-- everyone wants a glimpse of the new Jaeger, the shiny new paint, the flawless limbs, the brief moment of perfection before it picks up battle scars like every Jaeger before it. Crusher Gamma is mostly green, like a beetle’s shell, slightly iridescent. Right up against the railing, the Farrelly brothers watch it come in like expectant fathers outside a delivery room, avid and enraptured with the arrival of the most important thing in their lives. Avery leans her shoulder against Severin’s and tries to feel happy for them.

“Is this one larger than the others?” he asks. “It looks taller.”

“I think it’s something like a dozen feet taller than the next tallest one here,” she says, as if she hadn’t read the specifications of this one, as if she didn’t know the specs of the Jaegers here by heart. “It’s weighted differently, too. It’s more top-heavy.”

“Well, so are the Farrellys,” he points out, and she snickers. They’ve both got ridiculously sculpted muscles that they quite like showing off in the kwoon and in the gym, but they’ve also got the skills to put those ridiculous muscles to use, having made a name for themselves on the MMA circuit. Jealous as Avery is, she’s also eager to see how those skills will translate against a kaiju. “They’ll do well, I think.”

“They’d better. Coming on the heels of the brothers piloting Gipsy Danger? Can’t let Anchorage have all the fun, after all.”

“You’re not very patriotic,” he says, and she wrinkles her nose at him. “Aren’t Americans supposed to be more proud of their compatriots?”

“Aren’t Scotsmen supposed to wear kilts?” It’s a stupid joke, but he lifts a corner of his lips anyways. “I’m not very patriotic, no. Despite the fact that my original plan was to join the US military, I’ve always been kinda disillusioned with the whole American dream thing.” She shrugs, looking out into the ocean. “I wanted to fly jets. Somewhere far away from where I grew up. See the world, you know? Just, the type of pilot I wanted to be changed as soon as there was something better than a jet to hope for.”

“Never set your aspirations low, have you?” She laughs, but it’s not a happy sound, and it’s swallowed by the heavy beat of the Sikorskys carrying Crusher Gamma.

“I figured if I could defy death once I may as well make a habit of it.” His eyes are on her face, and he misses the way she kneads her left thigh. She doesn’t elaborate, and the roar of the choppers precludes him from asking. Avery watches the Jaeger, and Severin watches Avery, and for a moment they both feel the same mixture of longing and resignation.

\---

Avery storms into Severin’s office and flops down in the chair in front of his desk. “I just came from LOCCENT. Observing the Farrelly brothers’ initial test for Crusher Gamma.” Severin looks up from his monitor, blinking a few times at her sudden appearance. “100 percent neural overlay in eight seconds, handshake held for two and a half hours. They snapped together like Lego pieces.” She runs her hands through her already wrecked hair, tugging on the longer strands in front in frustration. “I’m never going to be Drift compatible with anyone, will I? You should stop wasting your time on me. I’m never going to be a pilot.”

“Half true,” he says, and she looks at him in anguish. “You won’t be a pilot. There is someone you are Drift compatible with, but he won’t fight the kaiju.”

“There’s-- someone? An actual person? You know who he is?” Avery stands, planting her hands on his desk and leaning forward, wide-eyed. “I don’t-- I don’t need a Jaeger. My hopes had been dwindling for months before you got here. I thought maybe you could fix me, but how long has it been? Eleven weeks, almost twelve?” He looks down at her hands, but her eyes are fixed on his face. “I just want one successful Drift. Just to prove to myself that I’m not out of sync with _everyone_.”

“Just because you’re Drift compatible on paper doesn’t mean you’ll actually have a successful Drift.” He isn’t brave, not like she is. This could still fail, and she’d be heartbroken. If this fails, she’ll likely have to leave this Shatterdome, her last shred of a chance gone.

“I don’t care. I have to make the attempt. You don’t know how it feels to reach for that connection over and over and always fail.” When he meets her eyes again, it’s clear that she’s already heartbroken, tears welling in her eyes. “Please, Severin, tell me who he is.”

“He’s-- he’s me. I know I’m not what you need in a Drift partner…” He trails off, bemused by the huge grin taking over her tearstreaked face. “I’m not a pilot, not a fighter.”

“No. You’re-- I knew you would be something to me the first day you got here. From the moment I met your eyes something just clicked, for months I’ve been bizarrely aware of you. This isn’t a shock. It’s a relief.” She wipes the tears off her cheeks, scrubs at her eyes even though that doesn’t actually stop more tears from forming.

“I’ve never Drifted with anyone. I’ve never even tried to.”

“Did you want to?” She lowers herself back into her chair and runs a hand through her hair again before twisting her hands together in front of her. “If you don’t want to…”

“I didn’t, before. I was curious, of course, but Drifting is-- it’s serious, it’s not to be done on a whim. You don’t get to choose what you bring to the Drift, and I never thought my curiosity outweighed my discretion.” When he leans forward, stilling her nervous hands with his own, she holds her breath until he says, “I didn’t want to Drift with anyone before it became apparent that I might be the only one you can Drift with.”

“So you want to now, what, out of pity?”

“Avery, don’t be stupid. You know me well enough by now to know I never do anything out of pity.” He can feel her hands trembling beneath his; he’d never realized how warm her hands are. “I want to Drift with you because I think you can be trusted with whatever I bring into the Drift with me. You’ve reached for this connection and never made it; I’ve never reached for it at all. You’re more willing to share yourself. I’m a very private person. But our brain scans match. With you… I don’t know if I would even have to try to let you in.”

“You called me Avery,” she says quietly. “You never do that.”

“That’s what you chose to take out of that?” he says disbelievingly. “I’m going to let you inside of my head and that--”

“Severin. Don’t be stupid.” She echoes his tone, except fonder, with a little smile. “I like the way you say my name, that’s all. I don’t… I don’t know what to say. Thank you, for trusting me, for giving me this chance.”

“You do know that this won’t remove the sword of Damocles hanging over your head. You may have to leave the Shatterdome when they find out I’m the only one you’re Drift-compatible with. I’m never going to be a pilot; my talents lie at a much further remove from the battlefield.”

“I’ll figure something out. I’ve been training in LOCCENT, I still have 40 hours to go before I’m combat-ready, but... Let’s just… let’s just see if this changes anything, first.”

“It’ll change us. It won’t change the PPDC.” At some point she became the one clasping his hands, and she starts to rub warmth into his chilly hands, running her thumbs over his metacarpals and the blue veins under his alabaster skin. “You know it’ll change us, Avery… no one comes out of a Drift unaltered.”

“I’m counting on it,” she says. He stares at her, a question in his eyes he doesn’t know how to verbalize, and in her blue eyes he sees a spark that hasn’t been there in the three months since they met. He’s seen her hopeful, and he’s watched that hope fade, but this isn’t hope-- this is sheer, unadulterated delight.

“When do you want to Drift?” he asks. She shoots a glance at the apparatus in the corner of his office. All they need is the Pons equipment, not the whole spinal attachment. They could do it right now. Part of her wants to do it right now, before either of them has a chance to form doubts, but no, she’s too worked up. The last thing she wants to do is drown him in a tsunami of her feelings.

“Tomorrow? Tomorrow evening. After dinner.” His hands had started so cold on hers; now they were warm, relaxed, clasping her hands back. She looks down at his hand, at the engraved ring, and she laughs out loud. “Is that the quadratic equation?”

“Yes. It was a gift from my mother when I got my first doctorate.”

“It’s not silver…”

“It’s titanium. She wanted to get me something indestructible.”

“Do you have a habit of breaking things, Doctor Breckenridge?” She’s teasing, but the corners of his mouth turn down slightly.

“I do not have a history of success with fragile things.” He says it with resignation, like he’s said it a thousand times, like it’s a catechism, like it’s been drilled into his head. She reaches up to brush her fingers against his cheek.

“Good thing I’m very durable, then.” She abruptly realizes that he looks absolutely wrung out, like he’s been running on strong black tea and twenty minute naps for days and it’s just caught up with him all at once. “You need to sleep.”

“Quite probably, yes.”

“You’re not going to sleep if I leave you here.”

“Not any time soon.”

“Do I need to tuck you in if I want you to sleep?”

“I’m not a child, Avery.”

“I am very aware of that fact. You need to sleep, I’m not going to Drift with you when you look like you haven’t rested in days. When’s the last time you got a full night’s sleep?”

“As in, eight hours in a row?” She nods. “2016.” She laughs for a second, then stops short.

“Oh, god, you’re serious? That’s two years ago. What the hell have you been doing?”

“Working,” he says shortly, and when she exhales a sharp breath he relents a little. “I have insomnia. When I do sleep I wake up from nightmares more often than not. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t feel tired.”

“I haven’t ever seen you look well rested, but I didn’t realize that was why your sleep schedule is so weird.” She stands up and holds out a hand. “Come on. At the very least, you need to lie down for a little while.”

“That’s probably a good idea,” he agrees, following her out of his office. He’s not surprised at all when she leads him to her room instead of his-- she’d been outspoken about her disappointment with how spartan his quarters are, and her room is about as cozy as military barracks will ever get. He’s only ever peered through the door before; she herds him in front of her once it’s unlocked, and turns to close it behind them.

“Shoes off, and at least unbutton your collar…” She turns around to find him three buttons down already, lips quirked upward at her.

“I don’t sleep like that, you know,” he says.

“Bullshit. I’ve caught you napping in your office five times and every single time you were buttoned to the throat.”

“You noticed that?”

“I notice a lot of things about you,” she says, and snorts when he reaches the last button. “Of course you wear an undershirt.”

“I’m always cold, the extra layer is a necessity.” He folds his dress shirt neatly and puts it on her desk. “Is it that disappointing to you?”

“Do you see the way I look at you half the time? Yeah, it kind of is,” she says. His dimple flashes for a moment, and he tugs the t-shirt over his head and folds that too. He’s not quite as thin as she feared he would be, which is a good thing-- with his eating habits, she’d half thought she’d be able to count his ribs, but he’s not unhealthy, just fine-boned and milk-pale.

“You’re on the line for keeping me warm now.”

“Wow, what an imposition. I changed my mind, put your shirt back on,” she says, and when he reaches for the desk she pushes him over onto the bed. “Are you kidding? Yeah right. Get comfy.”

“You should know that I have been reliably informed that I am incredibly difficult to sleep beside,” he tells her, rolling onto his side and watching her shed her sweatshirt. “I’m prone to crying out and moving around rather a lot.”

“We’ll be fine. As long as you don’t kick me, I don’t mind.” She pauses with her hand on the light switch, looking him over for a long moment, and then plunges them into profound darkness. In a second she slips into the bed and tugs the covers up over them. “Is it… would it be okay if I held you?”

“I think that would help,” he says, turning over so she can spoon up behind him. Her breath tickles the nape of his neck, and she is very warm at his back, and by the time she settles an arm around his waist and murmurs, “Good night, Severin,” he is asleep.

He needs this desperately, she knows, and she doesn’t know how light of a sleeper he is, so she stays just where she is-- lips a breath away from his neck, hand spread out over the steady beat of his heart. _The first time I kiss him anywhere, he’s going to be aware of it_ , she thinks, just before she follows him into unconsciousness.

\---

He wakes up all at once, surfacing from a dream like a diver starved for breath. It’s dark-- which it always is in any Shatterdome barracks with the lights off-- and there’s someone behind him-- _Avery_ , his mind supplies, _Avery took you home with her and made sure you slept, because she’s going to Drift with you today_ \-- and he’s still partially terrified, but most of what he feels is relief. He’s known about their Drift compatibility for two months and change, she’ll probably be livid that he kept it from her for that long, but he’d been looking for someone who could make her dreams come true. He knows, as he’s known all along, that he’s the best chance she’s got for a successful Drift, but he hadn’t expected her to be pleased by that fact. He’d expected disappointment when she learned she could only Drift with a noncombatant.

A lot of things seem to be happening that he didn’t expect. He hadn’t thought he’d sleep soundly in Avery’s arms, but he is grateful that he did. He checks his watch-- six hours. That’s the most sleep he’s gotten at once since arriving at the Shatterdome. The watch’s glow reminds him that he’s shirtless, but for a very pleasant change of pace he’s not cold at all with Avery still holding him close. For all the fact that she’s mostly lean muscle, she’s still soft and comfortable pressed up against his back. He tries not to disturb her by moving around too much, but even settling a hand on her hip proves enough to make her stir.

“Mm… Severin?” Her arm around his chest tightens slightly. “Did you sleep okay?”

“I slept astonishingly well. Thank you.” She hums, nuzzling the back of his neck, and then sighs softly. “Are you all right?”

“You have no idea how completely all right I am,” she affirms. He can feel more than hear her yawn behind him. “I had a weird dream… you had cardinal wings and you were flying around outside the Shatterdome. You looked so small next to Echo Saber.”

“Well, I am small compared to any Jaeger. Cardinal wings?” She reaches up and runs her nails through his hair, and he tips his head into her touch instinctively.

“Bright red ones. I’m gonna turn on a light,” she says, moving away from him for the barest possible amount of time, flipping the switch and diving back under the covers with him, now face-to-face on her pillow. “You still look tired,” she says, and his lips quirk up.

“One night of sound sleep isn’t going to undo a lifetime of sleep deprivation.” She lifts a hand and he closes his eyes to let her brush against the blue shadows beneath them. “I assure you, I feel well-rested for the first time in recent memory.”

“Good. Now I know how to get you to sleep, I’m going to come after you about that the same way I do about eating.” He shoots her a dubious look, and she grins at him. “What are you going to do, refuse me? ‘No thank you, Willoughby, I’d much rather continue coding until I pass out sitting at my desk than come lie down with you.’” Her impression of his cadence is spot-on.

“Highly unlikely,” he concedes, even a faint blush obvious against his fair cheeks. “You’d drag me out of my office even if I resisted.”

“Damn straight I would. Not all the time. Just when you think you can drink tea instead of sleeping for days at a time.”

“You don’t know how strange it feels to have anyone so invested in my well-being,” he says softly, and she smiles at him in his fashion, just an upward quirk of her lips.

“Of course I’m invested. How could I do anything but care for you, when you’ve put so much care into trying to fix me?” She reaches for his hand, twining their fingers together. “Whether-- whether the Drift works or not, I need you to know how I feel about you.”

“Tell me after,” he says. “Tell me once you’ve been in my head, if you decide you still want to.”

“I will,” she promises, “oh, I will. Don’t worry. Nothing I see is going to change that for the worse.” He looks much less certain about that than she feels, but who knows what they’ll bring into the Drift with them? She tugs his hand up to look at his watch. “Eight thirty? Seriously?”

“It was nearly two when we left my office. I know you usually get more sleep…”

“Not lately,” she admits. “The past couple of weeks… not so much.” He studies her face, as he’s done so many times before, but she doesn’t look tired any more, or sad, or any of the bad things that have crept into her expression as she’s steadily lost hope. Her blue eyes are bright, still delighted, and for a moment he simply lets himself be amazed that he’s made such a difference in her.

“I should-- we should get up, we shouldn’t stay here all day,” he says, making no move at all to let go of her. She squeezes his hand and smiles.

“Are you sure? We could.” She doesn’t move much, but even an inch and a half is enough to erase the small space between their bodies. His breath catches in his throat.

“Avery…” He hesitates, but then moves back, putting that inch between them again. “You shouldn’t make a decision like this before you have all the information you need to-- to make an educated--”

“What are you so scared I’m going to see?” She shakes her head. “You held me at arm’s length for so long when I just wanted you to hold me in your arms. Give me this much, at least.”

“Christ, I’m sorry,” he says, and she tucks her face into his neck as he wraps his arms around her. “I’m not good with-- with fragile things.”

“This isn’t fragile,” she breathes against his throat. “I’m not fragile, my feelings for you aren’t fragile, you’re not going to break me, Severin. If anything, you’re going to fix me.”

“No. You aren’t fragile.”

“What do you think is going to happen tonight? After the Drift… some pairs experience aftereffects, the Ghost Drift, the Drift hangover. I want this so badly, I think there’s practically no chance of not having something linger.” She pulls back enough to look him in the eyes. “I want… I want the first time I kiss you to be because of who we are before the Drift.” She smiles, tremulously. “I wanted to kiss you a day ago before you told me we were Drift compatible. I wanted to kiss you a week ago, a month ago.”

“Did you really?” This is the widest she’s ever seen his eyes. “You never said…”

“And what would you have done if I had said? I was with you more than anyone and you still wouldn’t let me close to you.” He bites his lip, and she sighs heavily. “You would have kept holding me away.”

“I… yes. Most likely, if you had told me before last week, I wouldn’t have believed you, or trusted you.” She gives him a look, an intent and almost hungry look. “Trusted you enough,” he amends.

“When did you find out that we’re Drift compatible? How long have you known?” He closes his eyes and pulls her closer, not saying anything for a long moment, and her heart sinks. “Jesus, Severin, how long have you known?”

“As soon as I started studying your brain scans. I recognized them immediately, they looked so similar to my own.” She goes deathly still in his arms, and he spares a second to think _Fragile after all_ before stumbling into his explanation. “You didn’t need _me_ , Avery, you needed a pilot. Someone to get in a Jaeger with you. I was never going to be able to give you your dreams, so I kept looking. Searching for someone who could.” He pauses, and she says nothing, so he goes on. “There’s-- there’s something broken in me, in my head, something I screwed up with experimental programming. I’ve done myself damage and I’m not even sure the full extent of it. You deserved someone whole, someone who would-- who would be invincible with you.” He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. “But there is no one. There’s only me. For nine weeks I’ve been trying like hell to find another Drift compatible person for you and I’m… I’m afraid I’m the best you’re going to get.”

“Nine weeks?” Her voice is shaky.

“Nine weeks, and I couldn’t-- I wouldn’t, I _wouldn’t_ have let you in for eight of them, I would have fought the Drift to keep you out of my head so you wouldn’t see just how much of a mess I really am.” He curls a hand at the back of her neck and shrugs. “I decided that I had to tell you less than a week ago. Decided I couldn’t keep standing in between you and what you wanted if I was really your only chance. But I couldn’t find the courage to tell you until--”

“Until I gave up on a Jaeger? Until I started crying?”

“Until I realized that it was killing you to keep thinking that you were the most broken of the two of us.”

“Severin…”

“No. Don’t. Don’t tell me I’m not broken until you see for yourself. This is the second most terrifying thing I can think of, Avery, and the first most terrifying is the precise thing you most want to do with your life.” He meets her gaze, and his tornado-sky green eyes plead with her to understand. “Your fondest dream and my worst nightmare are the same thing. I can’t make myself face a kaiju for you. But I can face my own weakness if it’ll make you see that you aren’t alone in the world.”

She stares at him wordlessly for a long moment, and then a shiver racks her. “You’d do that for me?”

“Right now you could ask me to do almost anything at all for you. What would you like me to do, Avery?”

“I’d like you to kiss me,” she breathes, and the corners of his lips turn up in the second before he closes the distance between them and covers her mouth with his own. It’s the least hesitant thing she’s ever seen him do. She opens to him at the first touch, surprised because her study of his subtle expressions never prepared her to find out that he kisses with tender expertise. He nips her bottom lip and she melts against him with a whimper. She gets a shivery little moan out of him when she drags her nails down the length of his spine, and they end up panting shallowly, breathing each other’s breath uncaring that it’s stale with sleep.

It would be so easy for them to forget about the Shatterdome and just stay here, learning each other’s quiet responses to intimacy. So easy for her to ignore everything but his flame-red hair, the pale skin she’s been dying to touch, the way he huffs in surprise when her fingers graze his side. He opens his eyes, and for the first time there isn’t a single siren in her head at his tornado gaze. It would be easy, too easy, for him to breathe in the scent of her tangled brown hair, to slide his hands over her fading tan and learn the curves of her body, too easy to lose himself in the endless sky blue of her eyes.

“Avery,” he says, simply for the pleasure of finally saying it, “Avery, love, is this all right?”

“Yes! Yes.” She leans over him, kisses him back with less artistry-- curls her tongue against his and soaks up his quiet sigh like rain. “What do _you_ want, Severin?”

“I want this, I want to kiss you, I want it to be okay that I can kiss you just like this.” His hands skim over her shoulders and one finds its way into her messy hair, and she laughs into his mouth.

“Please do. Well and often.” The places she’s dreamed of touching him, the dip of his collarbone, the hinge of his jaw, her fingers flutter and land and he arches his neck to press into her touch. She wants him so badly it’s an ache, wants him under her, over her, any way she can get him. “Tell me… tell me what I can’t have or I’ll ask you for too much.”

He quiets her with another gentle kiss, stroking her hair. “What is it that you want, Avery? Think about it.” She only takes a moment to come up with her certain answer.

“I want to Drift with you. Right now. I want to see inside your mind, I want you to see inside mine. So when we… when we keep going, you won’t be afraid that I’ll change my mind.” She can give him that, at least. If he can face his fears for her, she can do what’s in her power to allay them. “There’s no reason to wait, right? It was arbitrary when I said evening, we could do it right now, couldn’t we?”

“We certainly can.” He smiles at her just enough for his dimple to appear, and she kisses that little spot. “No one’s expecting you today?”

“No. I was going to spend the morning in the kwoon and the afternoon in LOCCENT. No one will be surprised if I’m in your office all day.”

“I hardly think it’ll be all day,” he teases. “I’ll be surprised if we’re in there longer than a couple of hours.”

“Depends on how long we’re Drifting,” she says with relish. “It could take a while.” She kisses him one more time, slowly and thoroughly, before she gets out of bed. “Do you want to change first?”

“Yes, I think so. I don’t mind rewearing pants, but this is day three for this pair.”

“In a row?”

“I haven’t slept, I’ve hardly left my office. I’m afraid I was absorbed in my coding to the point of neglecting myself again.”

“You’ve been doing that more and more often.”

“Well, the Mark 4 operating system required a heavy reworking to compensate for the switch from analog to digital power. Most of it needed to be completely rewritten, and I--”

“Severin. You’ve told me.” She silences him with a finger across his lips. “Go take a shower, get something to eat, and I’ll meet you in your office in half an hour, okay?”

“Yes, all right. I can do that.” He takes a moment to stretch before getting up, and she can’t help the tiny sound of wanting she makes, hands twitching with how badly she wants to touch him again. She has to turn away when he puts his shirts back on, digging through her drawers to keep from having to watch him button back up, all the way to the throat, as if he was walking more than a few hallways. He slides his arms around her from behind and leans into her, just a quick hug, but a tight one. “Half an hour.”

“Go, before I can’t let you go,” she says, and he laughs into her hair and leaves. For a moment she just stands there and breathes. Twelve hours ago she’d been despondent, eight hours ago she’d been on the absolute verge of giving up entirely, and then suddenly-- all at once she’d gotten everything she needed any more. The way he says her name, softly, like it’s a thing that needs gentle handling. All the things she’s learned about him since he decided to let her in. How he kisses, god, she’d imagined kissing him uncountable times and she’d never once thought he’d be so good at it.

She goes through the next thirty minutes in a daze. She eats and doesn’t notice what she’s eating; she washes up and gets dressed pinching herself every few minutes to double-check that she isn’t just dreaming. This has to be a dream, doesn’t it?

Her hair is still wet when she pokes her head through his office door. He’s not there yet, and she walks over to the equipment in the corner, picking up a Pons unit and weighing it in her hands. Eight times she’s plugged into a full neural hookup, and she’s never gotten anything more than a splitting headache and a case of the blues. This time-- she has no idea what will happen. There are so many ways to experience the Drift, each unique to the two minds creating a shared headspace. She can’t even guess what she’ll bring into the Drift-- her worst memories or her best ones, what RABIT might tempt them down the hole, whether she’ll be able to clear her mind. The one thing she doesn’t question at all is whether she’ll let him see: it’s a certainty to her that no matter where he looks, he will find her open to him.

“Avery,” he says behind her, and she turns to find him closing the office door with a full electric kettle in one hand. “I thought-- we might be shaken afterwards, a cup of tea might be--”

“Good idea.” He smiles slightly and sets the kettle on his desk, then drags his desk chair over to the corner where there’s already another chair for her. He doesn’t ask her if she’s sure, or ready-- she settles the Pons helmet on her head and he adjusts it for her before sitting across from her and donning his own with practiced ease.

“We don’t know what to expect.”

“I know.” She leans forward intently. “If you try to hold anything back, the Drift could fail.”

“I know.” He closes his eyes, breathes deeply, and all she can think is _yes, finally_ when his hand covers the switch. “Initiating neural handshake in three, two, one…”

warmth, warmth and softness, a little bit like fur, the feel of his mind against hers like petting a cat against the grain, a pleasant kind of ruffling meant to incite a purr

a stab of pain-- _what is that, the parietal lobe? oh god what have I done this time?_ \-- his lips wet, fingertips coming up sticky with blood and trembling hard, and he clutches the back of his head and topples out of his chair, thinking _bad code, bad code_

the feeling of weightlessness as the car flips, seatbelt holding her in as it comes crashing down to Earth with a sound like a soda can being crushed except so much louder and worse, and she hangs suspended upside down and screams for her mother, barely feeling the pain underneath the terror, but the pain will come

an ungodly, unearthly sound comes from the thing on the TV screen but he can hear it through the windows, he can feel the earth shaking under its footsteps, it tore through San Francisco like nothing at all and headed inland, he came to San Jose for the mild climate and because Silicon Valley is where he stood the best chance of getting a job with his programming degree once he got it and no one in California has a basement and he can see it, he can see it so far above the horizon, higher than anything else and it’s coming closer, what the hell _is_ it, he’s going to die and not ever know what the thing that killed him is

Brawler Yukon kills the kaiju and nobody nukes Vancouver and this is the new hope of humanity and that’s it, that’s all she wants to do, forget about flying jets, forget about having kids, forget about finishing college just because it would have made her mother proud, her mother would have understood that fighting kaiju is more important than a bachelor’s degree, she decides less than an hour after the Jaeger’s victory to drop out of college and enlist in the Pan Pacific Defense Corps

he wakes up in a cold sweat with Lisa screaming at him _what is your damage are you off your meds again what the fuck Severin_ and he doesn’t even know what he’s done until she turns on the bedside light and the bruise is already darkening her cheek and the sudden rush of nausea only gets worse as she keeps yelling _I can’t sleep next to you I can’t deal with you I can’t marry you just forget it_ and it’s not like he can help it when the sleeping pills don’t work any more and he’s not trying to hurt her, he doesn’t want to hurt anyone but she’d rather leave him than make him sleep on the couch and he wonders how long she’s been looking for an excuse to abandon him because he knew they had problems but he never expected it to come to this

 _neural handshake in three, two, one_ and she reaches out expecting Jace to meet her halfway, they sparred together in the kwoon for days and it was almost perfect but almost isn’t good enough for a Drift, it seems

 _three, two, one_ and she reaches out knowing that this time it’ll work, they understand each other, they’re on the same wavelength-- but they aren’t, she reaches harder and she knows she’s gasping but all she can feel is the gap between her mind and Taryn’s

 _three, two, one_ and for a split second she thinks it works but no, this is her own memory of hanging in the wrecked car bleeding out around the piece of metal through her thigh with her mother lifeless in the seat in front of her, crying _mommy mommy say something_ until the ambulance wails drown out her weakening sobs and then nothing, nothing at all

he gets the feeling that he needs to look left, and someone’s staring at him from against the wall of the hangar bay, some dark-haired whipcord-lean woman, and he wonders why he knew that Avery Willoughby was looking at him and he stares back, he’s seen her file and he knows her problem and he hopes he can do something for her

he gets the feeling that he should turn around, and his eyebrow goes up when he sees her coming right at him, and when she’s standing in front of him he can see that the eyes which look washed-out pale in the photo in her file are actually sky blue, she sticks out her hand and says she’s a pilot and she isn’t, not yet, but maybe with his help she can be

he’s up to his eyeballs in coding and there’s a quiet cough right next to him and he makes an embarrassing sound as he whips around to find amused blue eyes on him, a tray of food in her hands, and she stands there watching him eat until the fact that he’s starving takes over, she tells him to eat the cookie and he argues just to argue and eats it after she leaves even though he doesn’t want it

she sits across his desk and laughs so hard she sloshes tea into her lap and he simultaneously thinks _she’s ridiculous_ and _she’s lovely_

he’s asleep at his desk again and she counts the teabags piled on a saucer and she knows he empties it when he leaves for the night and at the rate he drinks tea it looks like he’s been in his office for three days straight without leaving at all, _what_ has he been working on that’s so damn important he can’t sleep? he’s still buttoned collar and cuffs and she wonders if he ever relaxes but takes off her sweatshirt and drapes it across his shoulders and turns the light off behind her

she knocks aside her opponent’s staff and stops hers just short of their nose, and honestly there isn’t a whole lot he’s learning from watching her spar any more but she’s so graceful when in motion, Jaeger bushido second instinct to her body after so long practicing it, she fights and usually she wins and if there were anyone who could keep up with her they’d be absolutely deadly in a Jaeger, she shakes the woman’s hand and smirks over at him where he’s holding up the wall, _c’mon, let me show you a form or two_ , _you’re at your desk all day long, you have to do something to move,_ and he shakes his head because sparring in the kwoon is one way to find out if you’re Drift-compatible and he worries what would happen if his clumsy body and her graceful one found a way to fall into sync despite their relative skill levels

how many hours has she spent staring at the Breach how long is it going to take before there’s another kaiju so she can actually test the skills she’s been training well the second set of skills since her first skill set isn’t ever going to be put to use is it? LOCCENT is its usual non-crisis buzz of low activity and she looks out over the Jaeger bays and she’s not actually going to do it but she wants to scream

 _I have to tell her_ he thinks after reviewing the biometric data of all the new recruits who’ve undergone their first round of testing at the Jaeger Academy, _there is no one else, I have to tell her, she’s going to be so disappointed but she needs to know_ and he sees her retreating into herself and he can’t say it and he sees her jealousy at the new Jaeger that isn’t hers and he still can’t say it and then she’s crying in front of him and he realizes that she’s in this much pain because he’s been keeping her there so he says it

affection, so much affection, concern and care and the heat of desire and he knew she was fond of him but he never thought she loved him like this

 _and now you know,_ someone thinks, _and now we both know_

And that’s it, the memories and emotions swirl away and leave them staring at each other with sky-colored eyes.

“You almost died and it made you fearless,” he says quietly, and she shakes her head.

“Not fearing death isn’t the same as not fearing anything.” She reaches out and takes his hand. “I see why you want to stay away from the kaiju.”

“I’ve been having nightmares about Trespasser for five years now. I don’t know whether they’ll ever stop. I took sleeping pills, but they stopped working after a couple of years, and they didn’t make the nightmares stop, they just kept me asleep through them.”

“Is 2016 when Lisa left you?” He laces his fingers through hers, looks down at their hands.

“Yes. I never-- I never would have lifted a hand against her while I was awake. But she’d collect bruises from my thrashing while asleep. It wasn’t predictable, some nights would be fine, some would be awful. We couldn’t afford a two-bedroom flat, and she rarely kicked me out to the couch.”

“You didn’t move around at all last night.” She squeezes his hand until he looks back up at her.

“I was bone-deep exhausted, and you were holding me. I don’t remember what I dreamed, but there were no kaiju involved.” His brow furrows. “I can’t promise any night in the future will be as peaceful as that one.”

“I’m stronger than you. And a lighter sleeper. I could wake you up when you start moving, or at least hold your wrists down so you can’t whack me.” She smiles at him just a little wolfishly. “I get enough bruises in the kwoon that a couple more from you wouldn’t be a big deal, anyways. Would it help if I woke you up?”

“It would probably help quite a bit. I’d rather have a sleepless night than see one of those dreams through to the end.”

“You have enough sleepless nights already,” she says, “and now I can do something about that.”

“Why do I have the distinct feeling that my overnight productivity levels are about to plummet?”

“Probably because you’re a very intelligent man and my intentions are obvious,” she says brightly. “Oh god, tell me you didn’t see any of my daydreams.”

“No, but I felt your emotions.” He gives her hand a squeeze and aims a tiny smile at her. “You have very strong feelings…”

“About you? Yes.” His chair rolls as she pulls him closer, and she reaches up to undo the Pons helmet he wears. “At first you confused me, and then you intrigued me. I wanted to befriend you… and then I fell in love with you.” She runs her fingers through his hair where it dried flat under the contact plates. “It all would have made so much more sense if I’d had any idea that we were Drift compatible. My weird awareness of you right from the start.” She scratches her nails against his scalp and feels a weird tingle on her own, and a slight feeling of guilt that isn’t hers. “Are we Ghost Drifting?”

“Unless I’ve developed a spontaneous case of extreme narcissism, I certainly hope these thoughts belong to you,” he says, flushed along his cheekbones. “Avery, honestly…”

“Honestly what?” she says mock-innocently. “Honestly I’m not supposed to think about what I’ve been wanting to do with you for weeks now that I know I can do it? Honestly I’ve been a saint keeping my hands off you for as long as I have?”

“Honestly, if we don’t leave my office immediately, I’m afraid I’m going to damage some very important equipment shoving it aside to make room for you on my desk,” he says, and she tears off her Pons helmet and pulls him up out of his seat in an instant. He stumbles, as he always does, and this time she catches his balance before he can. Her curiosity tickles inside his head. “It was my parietal lobe, that time I screwed it up. I’m lucky I didn’t lose the ability to walk altogether, but it took a while to relearn my sense of balance.”

“I had to relearn how to walk, after the accident. I was young, though. They called me resilient, once I healed to the point where they weren’t afraid they’d have to amputate the whole leg.”

“You are resilient. You’re remarkable.” She twines their fingers together as they walk, warming his chilly hand in hers. They walked these halls mere hours before in an exhausted daze; now they practically race to make it back to Avery’s room and slam the door shut behind them. She turns to pin him against the door with her hands on his shoulders, leaning up to kiss him with unrestrained fierceness.

She can feel him still, in the back of her mind, that sense of slight warmth when he’d walk into the room magnified a hundredfold. She can feel his own eagerness matching hers, a jolt of desire when she bites his lip. She can also feel the hand he has on her ass, and the one that’s slipped up her shirt to stroke long cool fingers against her side. “God, Severin,” she breathes into his mouth, “I need--”

“I know,” he says, “I know what you need, I can feel--” Pointedly, she thinks hard about just what she wants, and the sound he makes is half laugh and half moan. “As you wish.” He gives her one more squeeze before leaning back against the door, tipping his chin up. She grins at him as she starts unbuttoning him right from the throat, dragging her fingers across his exposed skin.

“No undershirt?” she teases.

“For expediency’s sake…”

“Practical.” She leans in to lick the hollow of his collarbone.

“I wasn’t aiming for practicality, I was aiming for your skin against mine in as little time as possible.” She keeps kissing her way down his chest, dropping to her knees halfway down, biting gently at his stomach. “Avery…” She undoes the last button of his shirt and goes for his pants immediately, glancing up at him for the permission he’s already given her tacitly after she flicks the button open. He arches both eyebrows, and she drags down the zipper with her teeth. “Oh, Christ.” She nuzzles against him and he tangles a hand in her hair.

“The only reason I’m not blowing you against my door right now is because I will actually scream if you’re not inside me in about a minute and a half,” she says conversationally. He huffs a laugh as he pulls her to her feet.

“Ninety seconds, got it.” It takes him four to divest her of her shirt and then she’s tugging him back towards the bed. Shoes get kicked off in the handful of steps from the door to the bed, she throws her bra in the direction of the desk, and when she falls back onto the bed she lifts her hips to let him tug her pants off. He drags his fingertips through the curls between her legs, presses in to find her wet and wanting, pushes a finger deep into her and savors the shivery breath she sighs out.

“Please,” she says, “come on,” and he kicks out of the last of his clothes and scrambles gracelessly onto the bed beside her.

“We need--”

“Not an issue, I have an IUD.” He would protest but he can feel her certainty, a steady thrum underneath the waves of need. She pulls him on top of her, hand on the back of his neck drawing him down for a kiss, and it’s as if they already know each other’s bodies, as if they’d done this a thousand times before in order to make it flawless now. He lines up, she wraps a leg around his hip, and in one smooth thrust he takes her completely, both of them crying out at the bizarrely twinned sensations the Ghost Drift transmits between them. “God, you feel--” It’s just a sense echo, a whisper of what the other is feeling, but even a whisper is enough for her to know how tight she feels around him, enough for him to comprehend what she means when she gasps “you fit me perfectly…”

They move together in perfect time, like Drift partners should, anticipating each other’s movements, knowing what the other wants. She stares up at him with half-lidded eyes and parted lips, looking overwhelmed and blissful and so, so beautiful, and he slides his palms up her body to cup her small breasts, thumbing her nipples and feeling them pebble at the first touch. She laughs, neck arching, and grabs his wrist to redirect him downward. He knows where she needs his fingers, feeling her pleasure and honing in on just the right spot, and her low moans and writhing kick up into high gear.

“Sev-- Severin-- oh fuck!” She braces a foot against the bed to rock into his quicker thrusts, gasping and raking her short nails down the back of his neck. He’s panting, breathless, presses his face into her shoulder to stifle a groan and realizes that she wants to hear him after a second.

“I’m going to-- Avery, I’m--” It crashes over him before he can say it, a few more deep, ragged thrusts and the fireworks of his pleasure race down both their spines and drag her over the edge a bare moment later, clinging to him and keening a wordless sound of bliss.

When he tries to shift his weight off of her, she holds him tighter, wrapping arms and legs around him, unwilling to lose the sensation of him filling her until it’s no longer an option. “You weigh next to nothing,” she murmurs, keeping him exactly where he is on top of her.

“I weigh almost the same as you do.” He sounds dazed, a little shaky.

“You’re five inches taller than me and I’m mostly muscle. You’re a feather.” Her breath tickles his ear, and her hands skimming up and down his back make him realize that they’re both sweaty and still slightly trembling. “You know that just set the bar ridiculously high for our sex life.”

“For some reason I don’t think we’re going to mind striving to exceed it.” He shifts enough to meet her eyes, and she realizes she’s never seen him smile without reservation before this moment. His smile is a little crooked, higher on the side with the dimple, perfectly imperfect. “I didn’t realize that Drifting would have that much of an aftereffect.”

“I told you before we did it, I wanted it badly enough that I knew something would linger.” She reaches up to cup his dimpled cheek, beaming back at him. “I hoped. You feel right, in my head. Comfortable. Like you’re supposed to be there.”

“It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever felt. But also one of the best things I’ve ever felt.” He kisses her slowly, thoughtfully, threading one hand through her hair and tugging it because he knows she’ll like it, feeling just a tiny echo of her satisfaction now. “My darling dearest,” he breathes against her lips, and she sighs sweetly. “I’m so sorry I let you think you were alone for so long, but you’re not alone. I won’t let you think that ever again. At least, you have me.”

“At least?” She laughs. “ _At least_ I have the one person who’s shown me any concern in the past two years, _at least_ I have the man who’s been haunting my dreams since the day he showed up, _at least_ I have this genius who’ll love me despite the fact that we’re both broken. At most, Severin. You’re not the least, you’re the most-- the most I could have asked for, the most suitable, the most willing to brave his fears for my sake. I don’t need anyone else, Severin. Just you.” Her lips brush his cheek on the way to his ear. “Just you and I together,” she whispers. He shivers and holds her closer.

For a long moment they simply cuddle together, breathing falling into sync with neither of them thinking about it. This time when Severin tries to move, she lets him, although he doesn’t go far-- her bunk is narrow, and there’s not much space between her and the wall. He rests his head on her shoulder, and she can feel the question building well before he asks her, “How long do Ghost Drifts last?”

“The intensity will fade. Drift hangover… well, all the information we have is from Rangers. People who Drift on multiple occasions.” Her fingertip traces idle shapes on the arm he has draped around her. “We don’t really have a reason to Drift again. It’ll fade. But Drifting changes your neural structure even the first time you do it.”

“I’ve changed my own neural structure already. I’m sure that I much prefer whatever having you in my head changed than the changes I wrought with my own bad code.” He strokes his hand up and down her side, and his voice is lower when he asks, “What do you think will happen when we tell the marshall that you had a successful Drift?”

“I have no idea,” she admits. “I’ve been training in LOCCENT for the past few weeks so I could stay with the PPDC even if I never could Drift. But in their view, only being able to Drift with someone who can’t fight probably won’t be any better than not being able to Drift at all.” She only realizes that they’re breathing together when he sighs the same instant she does. “They might-- they probably will-- split us up. Reassign me once I’m fully trained.”

“I won’t let that happen.” Avery blinks at him, surprised at the conviction of his words. “Now that I’ve experienced the Drift for myself, testing my code alone seems like a far less effective way to program, especially testing something as complex as the Mark 4 OS, which has required so much overhauling of the programming from the ground up. Having two test subjects-- testing against a full Drift and not just a solo neural hookup from the drivesuit--”

“Why Severin, are you asking me to be your guinea pig?” She laughs, but his earnest expression doesn’t change.

“Not my guinea pig. And not just my test subject. My assistant.” He quirks a smile at her. “J-Tech is a good career path. You were already considering a shift to that division with a move to LOCCENT.”

“You’re a programmer. I don’t know anything about coding. And the fact that you’re requesting this after we Drifted-- people will come to conclusions.” She glances down at their naked bodies. “Some of them will come to the correct conclusion.”

“Ï can make our case. I’m rather persuasive when I need to be. And honestly, when was the last time you heard about Drift partners being assigned away from each other?”

“The only people who Drift are Rangers, and Rangers have a high mortality rate.”

“Avery. Give me a chance to figure this out. I’m not going to just let myself be separated from you now.” He kisses her gently; she turns it desperate, biting at his lip and soothing the sting a breath later. She pulls back to say something, and is interrupted by klaxons echoing throughout the Shatterdome.

“Kaiju,” she says instead of whatever she meant to say, and slips out from underneath him. “Near us?” He shrugs, and she tosses his boxers at him before picking her own clothes off the floor. “What do you do when a kaiju attacks?”

“This is the first time I’ve been in a Shatterdome when it’s happened.” He watches her dress, a little wide-eyed, forgetting to move until she throws his pants at him too. “Except for K-Day, I’ve always been closer to the Atlantic during an event. The research facility I worked at was in London, and I’ve been there since 2014.”

“Well, come on. I want to know what’s happening.” She doesn’t even give him time to tie his shoes before dragging him through the Shatterdome to the unused Jaeger bay. It’s the only empty one; across the staging area they can see activity in the other bays. She flips on a work station and scans the screen eagerly. “Category 2. Looks like it’s heading toward South America. They’ll deploy from Lima.” Severin’s relief that it’s going in the opposite direction melts through both of them, and she nudges him with her shoulder. “It’s been, what, five months since the last kaiju?”

“Four and a half,” he answers. “It was a few weeks before my reassignment here.”

“Right, it got taken down by Gipsy Danger. Los Angeles. They decapitated it. Not a bad way to kick off a career.” She can’t disguise the admiration in her voice. “I’m glad I’m not done with my LOCCENT training or I’d have to be there instead of with you right now.”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were doing that?” He doesn’t sound hurt, exactly, just extremely bemused. “I honestly thought you’d be sent away if they found out I was your only point of Drift compatibility.”

“I didn’t tell you because I thought… I don’t know, I thought you would stop trying so hard if you knew I’d given up that much.” She shrugs. “After that night you came to get me from my room, I was going to tell you, but I didn’t want you to add up my misery and the LOCCENT training and come out with the wrong answer.”

“I’m very good at maths, you know,” he says mildly, but his hand finds hers and squeezes it reassuringly. “I’m still going to push for having you work with me, though.”

“You want to Drift with me again,” she says delightedly, “you want to Drift with me over and over again. You want to pick my brain.”

“It’s quite an interesting brain. And don’t pretend you don’t want the same thing, I know exactly what you think about that proposal, after all.” When she burrows against his chest, he laughs and wraps an arm around her. “It’s… it’s the closest thing I can give you to a Jaeger. Testing the operating system, running the simulations, it won’t be the same thing, but…”

“Are you kidding? Running simulations with you as my copilot? There is not enough yes in my entire body to express how much yes you need to know is my answer to that.”

“Even knowing what a mess I am?”

“If we keep Drifting, I’m sure I’ll run into some of your happy memories eventually.”

“If we keep Drifting, one of us is going to chase the RABIT at some point. Neither of us has experience with this. It’s bound to happen sooner or later,” he says. She pulls back enough to look up at him, brows arched.

“When we’re Drifting for actual official purposes, someone will be monitoring our neural handshake. It was stupid of us to do it unattended, we could have gotten stuck, we’re lucky in several different ways that it went as well as it did.”

“Actually, I programmed the neural bridge to disconnect if we went too far out of alignment. And, of course, I recorded our Drift and I’m going to review the data as soon as I get a chance…” He smiles at her just a little bit. “Honestly, Avery, just because I haven’t Drifted before doesn’t mean I’m not deeply familiar with the Drifting process from the outside looking in. It’s part of my job, and I’m rather good at my job. But yes, when we are testing new programming, there will be someone monitoring us.”

“Okay. Good.” After a second, she pokes him right under the ribs, and he twitches violently. “Haha, it works!”

“Avery Willoughby, I swear to god, if you think you can start tickling me now, you are desperately mistaken.” She pokes him again, and he buckles, trying to protect his side.

“You think you can stop me? That’s cute.” She goes for his other side, and squeaks when he throws his arms around her and holds her tightly, pinning her arms down.

“Please don’t tickle me. It’s undignified, and I don’t enjoy it.”

“Mm, that’s only half true, isn’t it? I promise not to tickle you in public,” she says, “but all bets are off when I have you under me. Especially when I can still feel you in my head and I know exactly what it does to you.”

“That’s-- uh--” He sighs heavily. “That’s incredibly unfair, using the Drift hangover against me like that.”

“Playing by the rules is boring. Don’t think of it as exploiting a bug, think of it as finding an Easter egg!” She giggles, spreading both her hands wide on his sides. “I knew you would be ticklish. Knew it before we Drifted.”

“You did not.”

“It’s in the way you carry yourself. You defend your sides.” Her hands slide down to his skinny hips and pull him flush against her. “I’ve wanted to get inside your defenses for ages.”

“I really wasn’t planning on letting anyone inside them… indefinitely, actually.” He huffs an amused breath. “Can’t even pretend that I’m not glad I did, though.”

“Such a romantic.”

“You weren’t expecting to be swept off your feet, were you?”

“Severin, I don’t know if you realize, but you did. Agreeing to Drift with me? Actually the single most romantic thing anyone has ever done for me in twenty-seven years of life.”

Someone catcalls from a bay across the staging floor. “Get a room, you two!” Avery flips them the bird and laughs.

“Come on. I want to see our Drift data. Now that I have some training and can interpret the results for myself.” She kisses his cheek before pulling away. His office is just how they hastily left it-- Pons helmets abandoned on the floor, chairs in the corner, computers humming quietly to themselves. He goes to the computer closest to where they Drifted and taps a few keys.

“That’s-- Avery, look at this,” he says urgently, and she peers at the screen for a scant few seconds before realizing what it means.

“100 percent neural overlay for twenty-seven minutes. It barely took any time at all for us to come into alignment.” Her voice is soft, awed, and she leans against him heavily. “I’ve never even made it to 40 percent before. Look…” She traces the graphed lines of their neural patterns, sharp peaks and valleys perfectly matched to each other. “Jeez, no wonder I had a weird feeling about you right from the start.”

“...I was about to say that psychic phenomena have never been proven, and then I realized that I can still feel you in the back of my head.” He laughs a little. “Aside from after a Drift, though, there’s no proof of them.”

“Shh. Shut up and enjoy the feeling of destiny happening.” She reaches up to card her fingers through his hair. “Whatever you tweaked in your head by accident, I guess I had tweaked from the start.”

“That would have been the first time I botched it, about five months after I started coding, not very long at all after I started testing the programming. All of a sudden my brain scans went a little bit weird, and I could never pinpoint exactly where in my brain was changed. I had terrible headaches for a few months, and then they just stopped happening.” He taps a few keys and whistles. “These numbers are as good or better than some pilot teams in the field.”

“You realize there is zero chance that I’m not dragging you into the kwoon at some point, right? Not to teach you Jaeger bushido or anything. Just to see how we move together.”

“Oh, I’m quite interested in how we move together,” he says, sliding a hand down her spine and into her back pocket. “I think we should investigate that more. Immediately.”

“I think I like the Drift hangover as much as I like the Drift,” she laughs, and leads him back to her quarters.

\---

Inside the walls of the Shatterdome, gossip doesn’t take long to circulate. Two days after Avery and Severin tell the marshall about their Drift, three people in LOCCENT ask why she’s still there if she can Drift now.

“I can finish my training in less than two weeks,” she tells them, which is the truth. “I might as well see it through to the finish.” She glances out the big window looking out onto the Jaeger bays, and finally it doesn’t hurt to look at them.

They walk into the mess hall together and suddenly the volume drops for a moment. It’s not even like they’re touching, but they don’t really need to be. Anyone who looks at Avery can tell something is different about her; Severin is, as always, difficult to read, but the way he’s watching her so intently speaks volumes even without an associated smile. Suddenly the noise ticks back up, and they can hear their names in the conversations they pass on their way to get food. She looks around, eyebrow arched, for just a second, but as soon as he says something, she tunes every other person in the room out.

She’s been the topic of gossip often enough before. She’s okay with people talking about her for a reason that is unequivocally positive. And just because their names are on everyone’s lips now doesn’t mean she hasn’t heard them from a few people before, the kind of speculation that runs rampant in such a closed-off society, insinuations made when they spent so much time together before coalescing into “I knew it”s and “told you so”s from some of the gossipmongers now that the spark has ignited.

Nothing they say really matters to her. She has no trouble dealing with the occasional catcalls, even though Severin blushes a not-very-attractive crimson contrasted to his red hair every time he hears one. It’s not even that he’s prudish, he’s just intensely private, and he’s done a rather thorough job at avoiding the gossip up until this point. So when they sit down to eat and get a lot of furtive glances and muttered conversation at the other end of the table, Avery glares at them until one of them says, “Hey, congratulations on finally Drifting.”

“Thanks,” she says, “feel free to stop talking about us while we’re sitting right here, okay?” A few of them look abashed, and they resume talking at normal volume about the new Jaeger. She winks at Severin, who looks more confused than anything, and gets on with her dinner.

\---

Severin figures that, if nothing goes wrong, he’ll be finished coding Hydra Corinthian’s operating system in two months. That’s a little less time than is expected for the Jaeger to be completed construction; it it had been more time, he’s sure he’d have the PPDC breathing down his neck to hurry up. But he’s working less absolute time now; instead of staying up all night five nights a week, Avery drags him to bed around 2 a.m. every other night and they spend six or seven hours sleeping. He’s actually more productive getting semi-regular sleep than he was on his old system of naps until exhaustion drove him unconscious for a few hours, even if he’s spending slightly fewer hours in his office, and in Avery’s arms the nightmares come a little less frequently, and she wakes him up before they get too horrific. He’s getting used to waking up pinned underneath her, wrists held down by her warm hands, and letting the fear ebb away as they breathe together, anchored by the weight of her body and the warmth of her love.

She follows through on her threat to get him into the kwoon, but she also keeps her promise not to throw him into Jaeger bushido training. They practice tai chi instead, moving slowly, deliberately, and, after not very long, usually in perfect synchronicity. She takes any chance she can get to correct his form, hands guiding his body into position, but he picks it up quickly, and his slight clumsiness is nowhere to be found after a couple weeks of practice. They even collect  watchers every time they practice, people coming in to watch the pilots spar and getting distracted by the two of them flowing through postures in unison.

They start testing the OS once the whole body is coded, movement and motion, the most basic simulations of walking around, moving each part of the Jaeger that’s supposed to move. The weapons systems come next, missiles and phased energy cannon and blades in the arms, and once those get coded they start running the same simulations that pilot candidates run. Avery is exhilarated, just as lethal as Severin thought she would be; once he gets the bugs ironed out of the programming, every simulation ends in a kill. He moves with her, but she’s the one making the motions. _They’re just code_ , he reminds himself every time the kaiju appears, _they can’t hurt us, but she can hurt them_ , and he sinks into the silence of the Drift, carrying his half of the neural load and letting her lead the dance.

Every time they come out of the Drift, a little more seems to linger, until the vaguely furry feeling of her mind brushing against his is commonplace, until they start finishing each other’s sentences, until they each have a slight sense of what the other one is doing almost all the time. It’s not as obvious or as jarring as the twinned sensation they experience in the immediate Drift hangover, but the Ghost Drift remains just at the edge of his senses, a warm and near-constant reminder of the woman he trusts enough to merge minds with.

\---

The earth shakes below his feet, and Severin walks toward the window slowly, thinking _here we go again_ , but when he looks out, what he sees isn’t scaly skin and a head like an axe blade. What he sees is a suit of armor as big as a building, a white bird of prey emblazoned on the chest, taking up position between the shape growing on the horizon and the city. He leans against the windowsill and watches the Jaeger stand ready to fight, and there was no Jaeger to save anyone on the day Trespasser came, but there is one here now, standing between him and the monster, and even though it’s distant from him and he’s alone, he can feel the steady pressure of a neural load weighing his mind, and he bears the burden like a gift, lending his strength to the woman inside the Jaeger gladly.

Trespasser comes, and inside her Jaeger, Avery holds the line outside of the city. Trespasser fights, and Avery fights better, faster, smarter. Trespasser howls as it begins to lose, a sound that splits the sky and shakes the foundations of the building he stands in, and he’s ridden out worse earthquakes than this with far, far less to look at, the bright flare of missiles sinking deep into alien flesh before flowering into bloody explosions, the way Trespasser tries to bite and has its jaw ripped off its hinge for its trouble, the way the massive body staggers and topples over to move no more. Avery stands over the corpse, solemn for a moment, and then turns her back on it and faces back toward San Jose. The bird on the Jaeger’s chest is stained with Kaiju Blue, and he knows this machine, knows the shape of her armaments and the balance of her limbs, he knows this Jaeger because he programmed it, or will program it, the code is alive in his mind even as he watches it come closer. Falcon Dancer, that’s what it’s called. Their Jaeger. Avery’s and his.

“Severin…” Her voice comes, not out of the Jaeger, but next to him, and he stirs and opens his eyes slowly to find her peering at him curiously. “You were laughing in your sleep. I was a little freaked out, honestly.”

“So it doesn’t bother you when I almost hit you, but a little laughing weirds you out?” She scrunches her nose at him, tucking herself closer to his side.

“Considering I usually hear you screaming in your sleep? Yes, laughing is an uncomfortably unusual thing to hear you do. I’m not saying I wouldn’t rather hear it more often, just… what in the world were you dreaming about?”

“Same thing as usual, except you were there, standing between me and the kaiju.” She arches her eyebrows, and he reaches up to stroke her hair back from her face. “You were in the Jaeger, and I was on the ground, but I was helping you carry the neural load. And you tore Trespasser to pieces.”

“Mm, I like this dream. You’re letting me come to your rescue now?”

“You’ve been saving me from Trespasser by waking me up for how many weeks now? And we’ve Drifted how many times? I’m surprised this is the first time you’ve come walking through my nightmares, honestly.” He kisses her, still sleepy and slow, but purposefully, shifting around to get her underneath him. “We had a Jaeger, it was ours. Falcon Dancer.”

“Oh, I like that. Was she pretty?”

“She was almost as lovely as you are.”

“Sweet talker.” Avery threads her hands through his hair, rubbing her nose against his. “I should save your life more often if it means you’ll flatter me like that.”

“I think that calls for a bit more than flattery,” he laughs, and kisses her again, starts trailing his lips down the line of her throat, nips at her skin when she tips her head to give him better access. “My heroine.”

“Does that make you my damsel in distress?” she quips, gasping a giggle when he bites harder. “Mm, sorry. My co-pilot, after all.”

“Go ahead and save me.” She’s warm under his hands, wriggling a little as he teases his way up her sides, grazing her skin with his bitten-down nails. “My personal dragon slayer.”

“Oh hey, don’t insult dragons like that. Kaiju are nothing like dragons.”

“For one thing, dragons are fictional and kaiju are real…” She smacks his shoulder lightly, and he stifles his smile into her neck. “I’m sure you’d never kill a noble dragon. With wings, right? Fire-breathing?”

“Let’s just hope kaiju never come like that. What an unpleasant thought.” They both shudder a little at that, and Avery sighs. “You know, I never wanted to be rescued from a dragon when I was a girl. I wanted to talk to one. Explore its hoard. The thought of waiting around for some knight to save me was so boring.”

“I can’t imagine you needing to be rescued from anything.” He laughs. “I can’t imagine you doing anything except the rescuing.”

“Only the once,” she says, “since I was eight, no, I’ve kept myself from needing rescued.” Her hand covers her thigh, and he reaches down to ease it out of the way and run his fingertips along the thick line of scar tissue there. She sighs again, leg shifting to encourage his touch to continue, and he smooths his hand all the way up her thigh and teases her at the apex. “Is this my reward for saving you?”

“Not quite…” He kisses her neck again, tugs the collar of her shirt away to kiss her shoulder, and starts nuzzling his way lower, hands pushing her shirt up to bare her stomach and leaving little bites in a trail down.

“Oh. Oh… yeah, I’m going to have to save your life more often, I think.”

\---

It’s a stupid accident, a misplaced toolbox and a lack of attention, that causes Eckhart, the left-side pilot of Echo Saber, to break his leg in two places. There’s no way to pilot a Jaeger with a limb in a cast, so the marshall benches Echo Saber for the ten to twelve weeks it’ll take him to heal.

Two weeks after the accident, the Breach spits out another kaiju, and this one doesn’t go in the other direction. It heads straight for Sydney. Crusher Gamma and Vulcan Specter deploy immediately, flown out to the far side of New Zealand to try and intercept it before it even sees land.

It’s a big one, Category III, codenamed Charybdis. Avery sits at her station in LOCCENT, monitoring the vitals of the pilots of Vulcan Specter, watching the big screen as the monster tracks closer and closer. About 200 miles out, it shifts course a little, orienting itself towards Auckland. The Jaegers converge on it thirty miles from the coast, and with an earth-shaking roar, Charybdis attacks.

This kaiju has a vicious spiked tail that keeps the Jaegers from coming at it from behind, swiping out the legs from underneath Crusher Gamma when the Farrellys make an attempt at doing just that. They get up and hang back while Vulcan Specter unloads a round of missiles into the kaiju. Blue blood sizzles when it hits the ocean water, but all the strikes seem to do is infuriate the kaiju, not set it back at all.

Charybdis charges at Vulcan Specter, who meets it head-on, fist slamming into its skull and knocking it for a loop, but only momentarily. The grasping claws seize Vulcan Specter’s arm and yank, and the Jaeger goes down spitting sparks from frayed cables. Avery’s screen shows both pilots’ vital signs spiking, neural overlay wavering a few percentage points before stabilizing again, and it takes them a long, long moment to regain their feet.

Crusher Gamma comes at the kaiju again, and the rain of blows it showers on the creature are clearly the result of the brothers’ MMA experience, but martial arts don’t work so perfectly on such a non-human opponent. They grapple with the kaiju, and that spiked tail swings around and smashes into the Jaeger’s torso, knocking them loose. Charybdis howls again and pounces on Vulcan Specter, bearing the Jaeger down into the ocean, claws ripping at the shoulders even as the pilots try to deploy the blades built into the arms. Only the left one springs free, and they jab and slash at the kaiju’s side until Crusher Gamma pulls it off the other Jaeger. The right arm is completely dead, and Vulcan Specter can’t get back up.

“Vulcan, stay down, play dead, deploy emergency pods only if absolutely necessary.” Marshall Ferrox leaves his pacing at the front of the room to come up behind Avery. “Miss Willoughby, a word.” The person at the station next to her looks over at them, and he points at her screen. “Jackson, watch this screen as well.” Avery’s heart is in her throat as she follows the marshall out of LOCCENT and into his office. “You’ve been running simulations with Breckenridge,” he says with no preamble. “Very successful ones. I believe your kill count is seven for seven attempts?”

“Yes, sir,” she says. “But they’re simulations. He’s terrified of the kaiju, sir.”

“Any person with sense in their head is terrified of the kaiju,” he says dismissively. “You and he are the only people available who can pilot Echo Saber right now. We need to hold the miracle mile, or that thing will plow right through Auckland as an appetizer and head here for a main course. Sydney can’t take another hit like that.”

“Sir, he’s not a combatant. His instinct is to run. Face to face with a kaiju, I can’t be sure that our Drift will hold. I can’t keep him from chasing the RABIT and fight Charybdis at the same time.”

“You can try, Willoughby. I don’t want to hear excuses, and I don’t care how you do it, but I want to see you and Breckenridge in drivesuits ready to get into Echo Saber in fifteen minutes or less.”

“Sir…” He looks at her over the rim of his glasses, daring her to say anything, and she swallows. “Yes, sir.”

Severin is in his office, staring at his computer screen blankly. She sits down across his desk and tries to assemble the words, and his blank stare shifts over to her and goes horrified. “No. I know why you’re here. No.”

“Ferrox ordered us to do it.”

“He can’t order me around. I’m a civilian. He can’t make me do anything.”

“You’re associated with the PPDC. He’s the marshall of this Shatterdome. Technically, he can make you do quite a lot of things.”

“He can’t force me to go into combat with no training.”

“What do you think the simulations we’ve been running have been? That’s combat training! That’s what pilots go through! All you have to do is help me bear the neural load, I’m the one who does all the fighting. Same as we have been doing.”

“We could both be killed.”

“Severin. We can do this.” She reaches out and covers his hand with hers, and he grips her with a desperate sort of strength. “Only we can do this. No one else here can.”

“That can’t be. Surely someone--”

“You’ve seen the same numbers I have. No other pair in this Shatterdome right now can top 80% neural alignment. None of them have had the kind of successes in their training that we’ve had in our simulations.” She can feel the tremor running through him in the fingers clutching hers. “If we do nothing, there’s a chance that it’ll make it to shore. There’s an even greater chance that we won’t even see it, that Crusher Gamma out there now will take it down. But it’s already taken out Vulcan Specter.”

“You know what you’re asking of me. You know exactly why I can’t do this, and you’re asking me anyways.”

“This isn’t Trespasser. You’re not helpless here. This is your chance to fight back. I know you don’t want to be a hero, but all we have to do is hold the miracle mile. We can do this. We’ve run the simulations half a dozen times.”

“For a different Jaeger! This isn’t the Corinthian, Avery, it’s not like you can just… just hop from Jaeger to Jaeger and expect to have the same results with a completely different machine!” He throws his hands up, then covers his face with them, laughing humorlessly and almost hysterically. “You’re not going to take no for an answer, will you?”

“You can say no.” She sits back, runs a hand through her hair and sighs. “You can say no to me. I’m not going to force you to do this, but we’re the last thing that can stand between that kaiju and Auckland. And I’m not the one you have to worry about if you disobey an order from Marshall Ferrox.”

“I can’t do it. You know I can’t. If I fall to pieces, you’re the one who’s going to have to try and scrape them together.” His hands fall, and he looks at her with wide eyes. “What do you think it’ll be like, Drifting with someone while they suffer a mental break? What if I drag you down with me?”

“I think you’re stronger than you give yourself credit for,” she says, “I think you’re more than just your fears. But if you think it’ll force you into a breakdown, forget I asked. I’ll just go back to LOCCENT and watch the Farrellys kill it, hopefully, and if not… well, I’ll hope that the reinforcements from Tokyo arrive before it plows through New Zealand and makes a beeline for us here.”

“I almost hate you for putting me in this position.”

“I can live with you being angry at me if it means we could save thousands of lives. I love you, but we’re only two people.” She reaches out and grazes her fingers along his cheek. “We’re the only two people I give a damn about, but we’re only two people.”

“Avery…” His face crumples at her touch, and he ducks his head quickly, covering his eyes with one hand, as if that’ll keep her from seeing him lose his composure. “God damn it. You know I have to do it.”

“I won’t let anything happen to you. We’ll come back, and you can be pissed at me for making you do it, and I’ll try to get you to forgive me. But we will come back.”

“You can’t make that promise.”

“You can’t stop me from making it. Trust me, Severin. I’m the fighter of the two of us, and I never fight harder than when I have someone to protect.” She stands up, comes around the desk, and wraps her arms around him, letting him shake and gasp, holding him together while he reasserts his self-control. “We’ll be fine,” she murmurs into his hair, “we can do this, together, we’ll be together the whole time, I’ll be right there beside you.”

“We’ll be fine,” he echoes, sounding much less convinced, but saying it. “All I have to do is help you carry the neural load. It’ll be fine. I’ve done it before.”

“I love you. You’re so much braver than you think you are.” He snorts disbelievingly, but when she turns to look at him, he’s steady again. “Come on. We have to get our drivesuits on. You know I like an excuse to look at your cute butt with circuits all over it.”

“However you get your kicks,” he says, following her out of the office, hoping it’s not the last time he walks out of this room.

Their drivesuits have only ever been hooked up to simulator equipment; Avery’s to the training module for the Shatterdome, Severin’s to the mock conn-pod at the research facility, and both to the equipment in his office. They show up to the drivesuit room in their circuitry under-layers within moments of each other, and Avery gives him a long slow look up and down and grins before the technicians start putting on the armor-plated outer layer of each suit.

It seems like no time at all before the spinal clamps are applied and they step up to the Jaeger controls, Avery on the right, Severin on the left. He hesitates for a moment before stepping in, and she can feel his uncertainty as vividly as she can feel her own excitement, even without the Drift being live.

“I’ve got the fighting, don’t worry about that,” she says. He nods. “Just like the simulations. You keep an eye on the telemetry, I’ll handle the actual combat.”

“This isn’t a simulation, Avery. This isn’t just code…”

“Buckle your seatbelts, guys,” the head LOCCENT officer says in their ears. “Initiating neural handshake in one minute.”

“It’s not a simulation. No. But it’s going to be all right anyways, okay? You have faith in me, don’t you?”

“I have plenty of faith in you. It’s myself I’m not sure about.”

“Well, I have faith in you, too. I believe we can handle this together.”

“Neural handshake in twenty seconds… nineteen, eighteen, seventeen…”

“We’ve got this,” she says for his benefit. “Just let the memories pass. And follow my lead.”

“Fourteen, thirteen, twelve…”

“This is your show, love. I’m just here for the ride.” She grins at him, and he shakes his head. “Be careful.”

“Eight, seven, six…”

“I’m always careful where you’re concerned.”

“Two, one, neural handshake initiated.”

a tabby kitten pokes its head out of the box and she screams in delight

the teacher writes the last figure of the quadratic equation and he thinks _that’s not so hard_

her college roommate stumbles through the door towing some equally drunk frat boy and she rolls her eyes and heads out to the lounge

Lisa smiles at him from across the table with a smudge of marinara beside her mouth and he reaches out, napkin in hand, to take any excuse to touch her

a dark room and the sound of quick breaths, a slightly chilly hand trailing down her stomach

Avery’s laughing with remembered ticklishness as they surface from the Drift, that last memory only a couple of days old, and LOCCENT says, “Neural overlay at 100 percent, ready for calibration.”

She lifts her right hand, flexes the fingers and makes a fist. Both Severin and the Jaeger do as well. “Right hemisphere calibrated,” the LOCCENT officer announces. She holds her breath as Severin echoes her motion with his left hand, and the Jaeger obeys just as readily. “Left hemisphere calibrated. You’re good to go, Echo Saber.”

“Ready?” she asks, glancing his way. He meets her eyes and gives her a smile so small and brief she would have thought she imagined it if she couldn’t feel his assent flowing between their minds.

“As I’ll ever be,” he says, and they step out of the Shatterdome to let the Sikorskys latch on and fly them out to where they need to be, a few scant miles from the shore of New Zealand. They don’t say anything on the way out, don’t really need to, riding the Drift together, a silent volley of _love/worry/reassurance/strength/fear/anticipation_ washing between them.

“Echo Saber, be advised that Crusher Gamma is down and the kaiju is on the move. Estimated time of contact six minutes.”

“So much for the chance that we wouldn’t even see it,” Severin mutters, breathing coming a bit faster, trying to rein himself in. “You’re sure you’ve got this.”

“Trust me, honey. It’s walking wounded. Just stay with me.” Avery, in counterpoint, breathes deliberately slower, deep inhales and exhales, getting herself into the headspace where this is everything she’s ever wanted to do.

“I’m right here,” he says, matching her breath for a few moments, and on the horizon they see something moving, growing, approaching at high speed. “Oh Christ, here it comes.”

“LOCCENT, targeting advisory?”

“Crusher Gamma took a chunk out of the neck. Focus your attacks there, the break in the hide should make it vulnerable.”

“Let’s hope it’ll oblige me trying to do that, then.” She cues up the energy pulse weapon, sets it charging, rolls her shoulders and waits for the kaiju to come in range. The closer it gets, the clearer they can see it, the harder Severin fights to contain his panic and the worse a job he does at it. “Come on, keep breathing, dammit! It’s not Trespasser, it’s not coming for us, _we’re_ coming for _it_.”

“Echo Saber, neural overlay is slipping out of alignment. 93 percent.”

“Severin, please. Please trust me. We’re gonna walk out of here, but only if you calm down. Focus on your breathing.” The targeting system beeps as it locks on. Avery can feel the Drift slipping, can feel his terror climbing her spine, and she knows she’s losing him. “Fuck! Just close your eyes, honey. It’s going to be okay.” He knows she’s lying, but he closes his eyes anyway, not that it does any good while Drifting with the Jaeger AI, closes his eyes and takes a deep breath and tries like hell to believe her.

“84 percent and dropping. Whatever you’re going to do, do it now!”

She can’t even spare enough attention to swear. Echo Saber’s pulse weapon fires, aiming at the long tear below the kaiju’s head bleeding blue, and before she can watch the blast of energy make contact, she follows Severin down the RABIT hole.

 _not in front of the children,_ his mother says, and Severin looks across the table at his sister and she reaches out to take his hand and lead him out of the kitchen, carefully, past the smashed glass on the floor, and he hesitates in the doorway because not-in-front-of-the-children means if he stays nothing will happen, right? he looks back and meets his mother’s eyes and she shakes her head, and he braves one last glance at his father’s stormy face before Sarah pulls him behind her and heads up the stairs, not outrunning the bellowed _goddammit Agnes_ and the sound of something else breaking with a smash, the sound of a woman’s cry, he wrenches his hand out of Sarah’s grasp and she gasps _Severin don’t_ but he’s already down the stairs and back in the kitchen, launching himself at his father’s legs yelling _don’t you touch her again_ and getting nothing but backhanded for his trouble, landing in a heap

Avery reaches out to pick him up from the floor, god he’s tiny, what is he, eight years old, ten at most? She can’t touch him, can’t do anything but talk. “Severin, it’s just a memory,” she says, “it’s past, come back to me.” He doesn’t seem to see her or hear her, eyes fixed on the man in front of him, and she reaches out with all the connection they’ve ever made to break through to him, “please, Severin, you have to come back to me, we need to come out of this.”

“Do you know what this is?” His voice comes from behind her, and she turns to see the man she knows, fists clenched and trembling. “This is what happened the last time I tried to be brave.”

“That’s not true,” Avery says. “You were brave every time you tested your own code. You were brave when you agreed to Drift with me. You were brave when you put that drivesuit on and followed me into the conn-pod. Being brave isn’t an absence of fear. It’s what you do despite your fear that determines your bravery.”

“I’m going to get us both killed, aren’t I?”

“Let go of the RABIT and maybe not. It’s a memory, Severin, an old memory. We’ve got something to do in the here and now.” He looks at the memory around them, the vivid mark on his mother’s cheek, the blood spreading from beneath his small hand where it landed on shards of glass, the stricken look on his sister’s face, and instead of looking at his father he looks at Avery, and the silence of the Drift floods back over the both of them.

“Echo Saber, respond,” the LOCCENT officer says in their ears, and Avery exhales and looks around.

“We’re here. We’re here, where’s the kaiju?”

“Look down,” the voice advises, and oh, there it is, the biggest corpse either of them have ever seen, head mostly severed from the body, leaking kaiju blue into the ocean. “Nice aim, Willoughby,” he adds, and she laughs in sheer relief.

“Thanks. How long were we--”

“Neural handshake fell to 71 percent sync for 93 seconds. You just missed the death throes. Don’t worry, you can watch the replay when you come home.”

“So what do we do now?” Severin asks, and she takes the opportunity to prod the kaiju with one foot. “Do we just walk back to Sydney?”

“Negative, birds are en route,” LOCCENT informs them, “the captain has turned off the fasten seatbelts sign, you are now free to move about the cabin.” They walk away from the corpse before Severin disengages from the controls and tears his helmet off.

"That was slightly less fatal than I thought it would be," Avery says brightly, "at least for us it was."

"Barely, but thankfully. I'm sorry I got lost..." He scrubs his hands over his face and sighs. "Although I did warn you it would happen."

"I told you I'd save you, didn't I?" Avery sets her helmet down and walks over to him, grinning. "I promised you we'd be okay."

"You thought you were lying to me the last time you said that," he points out, and she wraps her arms around him and leans into him.

"I was trying to get you to calm down before we lost the Drift. I'm amazed we got it back, it almost always fails after a RABIT event." Encased in the drivesuits from throat to toes, their cheeks pressed together are all the contact they can feel, and for a long moment they simply take comfort from that touch. Avery sighs quietly into his ear. “So, will you forgive me for dragging you into this? Since we survived and everyone’s going to think we’re heroes and all.”

“They’ll think _you’re_ a hero.”

“Uh-uh, no one outside LOCCENT knows anything about any RABITs being chased, and even if it gets around the Shatterdome it won’t spread beyond those walls. To everyone in Auckland and Sydney, we’re both saviors. And look on the bright side, we’re never ever going to have to do that again, since that was such an incredibly narrowly averted disaster.”

“We almost died,” Severin says slowly, “we certainly would have died if your aim had been a little less perfect.”

“Yeah, but we didn’t, and now you can put this on your C.V. Jaeger programmer and emergency pilot.” He snorts, and she jostles him lightly. “You want to go back to your research facility in London, huh? Far away from Jaegers.”

“Far away from the Breach,” he corrects. “I have to go iron the kinks out of Corinthian’s OS in person soon. Actually see what happens when it’s implemented. We still have a test run to do, you know. Maybe only walking around Kansas, but still.” He takes her hand, trying to lace their fingers together, clumsy in the drivesuit gloves. “Well, we have testing to do if you’re willing to go back in my head.”

“Honey, I’m still halfway there at the minute.” She smiles, squeezing his hand back. “Nothing’s going to make me want to stop going there. I still have some happy memories to stumble across, after all. And more to make.”

“Years and years more, hopefully.” He chews on his lower lip for a moment, and then says slowly, “Most Jaeger copilots are either related or married…” She tilts her head in agreement. “We could… would you like that? To get married, I mean?”

“Are you trying to make an honest woman out of me?” she asks, grinning. “Did you think this through, or is this the heat of the moment talking?”

“Well, I don’t exactly have a pocket to pull the ring out of, but there _is_ a ring. Should I have waited until I actually had it in hand?” He glances down. “Was it insufficiently romantic in the drivesuit? I thought you might like--”

“Wait, you have a-- you were planning on-- how did I not pick up on that?”

“I wasn’t expecting to propose in a conn-pod, but yes, I’ve been planning on asking you.” She blinks at him, and he clasps her hand in both his. “What do you say, Avery? Will you marry me?”

“Of course I will,” she says, leaning up to kiss him and laughing against his mouth. “Wow, this is one hundred percent not how I expected this day to go when I woke up this morning.”

“Hey lovebirds,” the LOCCENT officer says, and they both jump, “not to interrupt your moment, and hey, congratulations! But you’ll be touching down at the Shatterdome in a few minutes, so whenever you feel like emerging, you can do that once you feel the landing. And Eckhart requests that you not have sex in his conn-pod. So, you know, keep the drivesuits on for a little longer.”

“Well, that’s only slightly mortifying,” Severin mutters. “I didn’t realize they were still tuned in.”

“Our engagement is a matter of PPDC record now.” Avery sounds entirely too pleased about that, and honestly, if he’s going to be on official record for something that happened in this Jaeger, he’d rather it be the proposal than the failure to maintain the Drift. “We won’t be separated for sure.”

“After today? I bloody well hope not.”

“I don’t think PPDC brass is _that_ heartless. And Ferrox kind of owes you for sending you into the field when you’ve clearly and vocally been a noncombatant all along.” She says that last part a little more loudly, and he quirks a smile at her.

The Jaeger clangs as the Sikorskys set it down in its bay, and they reel against each other at the impact, clinging and holding steady until the conn-pod opens behind them and a familiar redheaded tech says, “We’d offer to leave you alone, but our actual pilot is super serious about you guys not fucking in here.”

“We’re not--” Severin starts, flushing scarlet, and Avery claps a hand to his chest.

“Eckhart’s just jealous because he couldn’t get laid in a conn-pod to save his life,” she says scornfully, “but seeing as I’m not equipped with a toolbox, I’m wondering exactly how he expected us to get out of the drivesuits aside from the overwhelming power of love divesting us of them.”

“Hey, don’t shoot the messenger, I’m just passing word along.” The tech hefts a power tool and grins. “But if you want to call me ‘the overwhelming power of love,’ I’m amenable to a nickname.”

“Klaus, I’ll call you anything you like if you get me down to circuitry in two minutes or less,” she offers, standing up and holding out her arms. “Honey, don’t look, I’m sure you don’t want to see another man unscrewing me.”

“Oh, I don’t know, I’m rather keen to watch you get unscrewed at the moment,” he says evenly, “although I’m sure Eckhart would be displeased to know you couldn’t wait to get out to the bay.”

“He can go screw himself.”

“Actually, it’s my job to screw him, too,” Klaus says, snickering, “but yeah, not in the conn-pod. Seriously though can we get out of here? Because he actually will have a meltdown.”

“Oh, fine, let’s not piss him off too egregiously.” She stalks out of the conn-pod with her head held high, and he follows her out, shaking his head slightly, thinking _she’s lovely_ and _she’s ridiculous_ in the same moment.

It does take more than two minutes to get them out of the armor, but not much more than that, with the determined effort of a few techs, and Avery smiles sickly sweet at the agitated real pilot of Echo Saber and tells him, “Don’t worry, we didn’t scratch the paint job or leave any weird stains on the driver’s seat.”

“You think you’re funny?” he demands, and she widens her eyes at him.

“Oh, do I have to have a sense of humor on top of being a hero? Cause you sure don’t manage it.”

“Don’t taunt him, darling,” Severin says, “he’s already brokenhearted enough that we had to do his job for him.”

“You think you’re badasses now or something?” Eckhart spits, and Severin shrugs eloquently.

“Me, no, not particularly, but she rather is, isn’t she? You could show a little gratitude that we brought back your precious Jaeger unscathed rather than being so jealous that we drove her at all. You’ll get back in the conn-pod… in eight to ten weeks. Most likely there won’t be another kaiju until you’re back in fighting form, and _I’m_ certainly not getting back in there, so we’ll all just hope for the best, won’t we?”

“Whatever. You two got lucky.”

“Well, yes and no,” she says, “I mean, we did, but that’s also my plan for the next twenty minutes if you’ll shut the fuck up and go away so we can get on with our day.” The wounded man goes bug-eyed, curls his lip in a sneer, and leaves without another word. “Yeah, he hasn’t gotten laid since he got here. Can’t for the life of me understand how such a charming man goes ignored.”

“You’re an instigator of the worst kind, you know? Of course you know, you take such joy in it.”

“It’s not easy being a smartass, but someone’s got to do it,” she says solemnly, “he’s got the ass part down, but I’m afraid the ‘smart’ bit is beyond him.”

“Don’t we have better things to do than stand around throwing barbs at injured men? If you’re happy to hang around the hangar bay, you’re more than welcome to do that, but I do have something I’d like to give you sooner rather than later.”

“Is it the D?” Klaus asks, and Severin gives him a withering look.

“In what universe would that be any of your business even if that were the answer?”

“Oh please, like proposing to her in an active conn-pod wasn’t going to start people making insinuations? You brought this upon yourself, man.”

“I didn’t know LOCCENT was still listening! How did _you_ hear, you weren’t in LOCCENT.”

“Uh, you were in the conn-pod of the Jaeger I’m in charge of maintaining? No shit I was still listening. What do you think the crew of a Jaeger does when it’s out in the field?”

“Severin,” Avery interrupts, “please stop arguing about whether we’re going to go have sex so we can go have sex, like everyone in this entire Shatterdome including me is expecting us to do.”

“That’s so off-putting. Thinking that everyone knows what we’re doing.”

“Okay, let me put it this way. You can go give me that ring, and I can conveniently make you forget about the other four hundred and fifty people in this building for an indeterminate amount of time. Because the only person you should be worried about is me, and you know what I’m thinking.”

“...fair enough.” He holds out a hand to her, and she takes it, and they both studiously ignore every person they see between the bay and his office. “One second,” he says when they get there, and goes to pop open the casing of one of the computers along the wall, retrieving a velvet-covered ring box from inside the machine. 

“Okay, how did you keep me from finding out about this? Because I can half feel you in my head more than half the time, I know what you’re thinking pretty often.”

“Oh, that was actually fairly easy,” he says. “I’d only ever think about it in the middle of a work day. After a couple hours programming, I never got the feeling that you were paying any attention to what I was doing any more. I’d thought you might get an inkling when the ring arrived, but I stashed it away and tried not to think about it. Seems I did a decent job of it.”

“You did, you surprised me.” Severin starts to go down on one knee, and she tugs him back up, laughing. “I’ve already said yes, how many times do you want to ask me?”

“As many times as it’ll put that smile on your face, or until you say ‘I do,’” he says, and flips open the box. “It’s titanium, not silver or gold…”

“Something indestructible,” Avery says, holding out her hand. The diamond twinkles as he slides it onto her finger. “How’d you get my ring size?”

“You don’t expect me to reveal all my secrets, do you? Does it fit right?”

“It’s perfect.” She wraps her arms around his neck and pulls him down into a kiss, melting against him when he holds her closer. “I love it. I love _you_.”

“And I love you, more than anything.” He slides a hand up her spine, settles it at the nape of her neck, and kisses her again, hotter and hungrier than before, feeling her eagerness reflecting and magnifying his own, driving out coherent thought in favor of waves of emotion. “I think we ought to go,” he murmurs against her mouth, and she laughs and reluctantly lets go of him.

“Come on, then,” she says, “race you there!” And she’s off like a shot, flat-out running through the halls, and his sense of propriety’s got nothing on the love and need that sets him chasing after her, laughter echoing in their wake.

The instant he closes the door to her quarters behind them, she’s out of her clothes and trying to get him out of his. “Impatient,” he says, and she snorts as she drags his shirt over his head.

“I want to put the adrenaline rush to good use, before it crashes and I fall asleep on top of you. I mean, I’m going to fall asleep on you one way or another, I’d just prefer to make love with you before that happens. Amenable?”

“Entirely.” He lets her push him down onto the bed, looks up at her and tries to bite back a laugh when she teases the back of his knee. “I swear, I’ll let you tickle me some other time, but not now.”

“I’m going to hold you to that,” she says, “You don’t even know what you just opened yourself up to just then.” But when her hands continue up his body, it’s with a firm pressure, not a fleeting one. She palms the points of his hips, traces the shape of his ribs, scratches her nails gently down the center of his chest and his stomach until her hand wraps around him and strokes firmly. His eyes fall shut, and she lets go of him to climb onto the bed, straddling his lap smoothly. “Severin. I want you to look at me.”

Green eyes open slowly, and as soon as they make eye contact, Avery sinks down onto him, gasping as he fills her. They watch each other intently; she circles her hips and he bites his lip; he rocks up into her and her eyelashes flutter, staying open only through sheer force of desire not to miss a single expression he makes, feeling an echo of what he feels but wanting to see it too. His hands roam across her body, reading the tension in her thighs as she moves on top of him, the way her hips shimmy, sending shivers of sensation through them both, how she arches her back when he rolls her nipples between finger and thumb. He meets the motion of her hips, and every thrust wrings a little cry of pleasure from her, quiet sounds that grow louder as she rides him toward her climax.

“Come on, love,” he urges her, one hand falling to her thighs, seeking out where she needs his touch and caressing her with his thumb, “let me see you fall to pieces for me.” She obliges him readily, laughing her way into a heartfelt moan, her hands braced on his shoulders trembling to hold herself up as her whole frame shivers with overwhelming pleasure. He has to fight to keep his eyes open to watch the joy on her face when he comes a breath after her, swept away by her feelings washing over and through him.

She curls up on top of him, catching her breath with her face tucked into his neck, and he strokes her back slowly, feeling the adrenaline receding and the endorphins beginning to ebb, leaving them both boneless and sleepy. “I don’t think that qualified as both yay-we-aren’t-dead and yay-we-are-engaged sex,” she says after a moment. “I’m going to say that was the life-affirming sex and when we wake up we need to have fiancee sex.”

“Sounds brilliant,” he says, kissing the top of her head. “What does that involve?”

“We’ll figure it out in a few hours.” She reaches out blindly, groping at the edge of the bed until she finds a blanket and drags it over them. “Mm. Naptime now.”

“Sweet dreams, my love,” he says, and holds her tight until he feels her mind slip into sleep, following her down not long after.


	2. (another way to get to know you)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so I'm batshit crazy over this soulmark trope and I wanted to give it a shot with Avery and Severin. So the idea is that when your soulmate is born, the first words they'll ever say to you appear on your skin like a tattoo. That would have changed the whole arc of their story, and I wanted to play around with it, so this happened.

The words on her wrist bother her more than she can really say. The handwriting is neat, almost fussy, and what they say is "Not yet, you aren't." And it drives her crazy not knowing exactly what she isn't yet when she knows there are so many things that could mean. She hates the words of her soulmark when she's young, but after her mother dies Avery throws herself headlong into becoming everything she wants to be, fuck whoever's going to tell her otherwise. 

The first thing she does after the physical therapy from the accident is over is take up gymnastics. She tells people she's a gymnast before she can pull a proper cartwheel, but no one contradicts her. Then she trades the parallel bars for a different kind of mat and enrolls in jujitsu classes. She lies about being a college student when she's still in high school, but she got early enrollment so it's almost not a lie. And then the kaiju come out of the ocean and the world looks like it's going to end, and then the Jaeger program is a success and Avery decides that she's going to be a Jaeger pilot and defend the planet, so that's what she aims for next.

She's beyond disheartened on the day she finally meets her soulmate, though. Fresh from yet another failure to Drift, after months of failures, she wanders the Shatterdome, wondering where all these new people came from and why she keeps seeing this one redheaded guy everywhere she goes, until finally she can't stand running across him without saying anything any more, and when she sees him in the cafeteria she walks up to him and sticks her hand out. "Hi, I'm Avery. I'm a pilot."

"Not yet, you aren't," he says, and they stare at each other for a moment, near-identical poleaxed expressions on both their faces. He shakes himself out of it first, finally taking her extended hand. "Hello, Avery. I'm Severin. I'm here to help you become a pilot."

"You are? How? Really?" She doesn't let go of his hand once she has it, and he doesn't seem inclined to try and take it back when he notices the words neatly written on the back of her wrist, turning her hand to inspect them. "Are you a pilot too? Are you my co-pilot? You have to be, right?"

"I'm not a pilot," he says with a slight wince, "I'm absolutely not a pilot, no. I'm a programmer. I program the neural interface." If he's that involved with the Jaeger program, then he's as aware as she is that Drift partners who aren't related always have each other's words somewhere on their bodies. She's just barely too polite to remark out loud on the fact that his are the only ones she has. 

"So you'll get me Drifting, huh?" she says instead, and when he looks up from his contemplation of her wrist, his eyes are the exact color of the sky before the first tornado she ever saw touched down, that eerie storm green that sets off sirens in her head. 

"That's the intent, at least," he says, and when she smiles at him, the corners of his lips turn upwards just the slightest bit, and she thinks _I should have guessed he'd be the reserved type, just from his handwriting._ "If you're not busy tomorrow, we could get started on figuring out what the problem is as soon as I've got my equipment unpacked."

"That'd be great." She lets go of his hand, finally, and adds, "I like your accent." He blinks at her, and she shrugs. "Scottish, right?"

"It's a bit obvious," he says with half a laugh, waving up at his hair. "Redheaded freckled Scotsman. Walking cliche."

"Well, for what it's worth, I think you're really cute." He blinks again, cheeks going a shade of red that doesn't complement the hair or the freckles at all, and she grins. "I'm glad to have finally met you, Severin."

"I should confess that I knew I would meet you here," he says, rolling up his left sleeve so she can see her own messy handwriting scrawled over his pale freckled skin just below the elbow. "When I heard you were having difficulty Drifting, it finally made sense. Before a few weeks ago, I wasn't even sure which gender you'd be just from the words."

"I hope I'm the right one," she says, and he huffs out a quiet laugh.

"I wasn't particular about it, but you're... prettier than I was expecting," he says a little awkwardly, and she laughs louder. "I'm sorry, that's strange."

“I intend to continue to exceed your expectations,” she says, grinning, and he gives her that barely-there smile again.

“I’ll have to start setting them higher, in that case. Give you something to strive for.”

“I’ve been striving my whole life, why stop now?” She lifts her wrist, showing him his own words again, and adds, “I’d like to stop being ‘not yet’ and start being, you know?”

“We’ll get there,” he says, “don’t worry. I’m very good at what I do.”

Avery looks up at him and bites back everything she wants to say, the whole gamut from _I just bet you are_ to _if I’m going to be a pilot I’m going to have to bring you with me_ and especially the thought flitting just around the edges that starts with _why don’t you follow me?_ and ends in her quarters. _Down, girl,_ she tells herself, _at least get his last name before you jump his bones._ “I hope so,” she says after a noticeable pause, “cause my prospects weren’t looking so good as of this morning.”

“That was this morning,” he says, and touches the back of her wrist. His fingers are icy; she wants to hold his hand and give him some of her abundant warmth. “Things’ll look a bit different tomorrow.”

“They look a bit different already.” He’s her Drift partner, the only one it can be. He says he’s not a pilot, but he also said he can help her be one. There’s only one way that can happen, and she’s almost dizzy with anticipation to finally make that connection. If she gets in a Jaeger, it’s going to have to be with him at her side. “So how long will it take you to unpack?”

“Oh, I’ll probably be at it all night. Why, are you that eager to get started?”

“You have no fucking clue how eager I am,” she says fervently, and he arches his brows.

“Well, you can always help. I’ve got quite a bit of stuff that needs setting up.” He looks around them, seeming to remember where they are only after a moment, and adds, “I don’t think either of us actually made it to the point of getting food here…”

“Well then, I’ll show you what’s actually edible,” she says, grinning, “Cause finding out by trial and error is not the way you want to go about this, trust me. C’mon, Sev.” He winces. “Not good?”

“No, please. I really don’t like nicknames.”

“So what should I call you?”

“Severin is fine. My name is Severin Breckenridge. Doctor Breckenridge, actually.”

“Aren’t you young to have a doctorate?” she says, playfully, and he winces again. 

“I’m 28.”

“Yeah, isn’t that young? Grad school and postgrad take time, don’t they? I mean, I only got a bachelor’s…” She frowns. “I’m poking a sore spot, aren’t I? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to offend.”

“No, it’s fine. I am young for it. I got started early and I worked hard, and… yes, I was young when I got it, and that wasn’t recently, either.” He lifts a shoulder in an attempt at carelessness. “I’m waiting for people to stop saying I’m young for it, given that I’ve had it for a couple of years already.”

“You must be really smart,” she says, “and determined.”

“I am both those things,” he says with a nod, “but you’re no slouch in either department, Miss Willoughby.” This time she winces, exaggeratedly, and the corner of his lips quirks. “Not good?”

“I never told you my last name, for one, and for two, Jesus Christ don’t call me Miss, if you won’t call me Avery then just call me Willoughby but don’t ever call me Miss.”

“I told you I was here to help you, Avery,” he says, “I hope you didn’t think I came to help you without knowing anything about your situation.” 

"Oh, so you've seen my file?" She picks up a tray and passes him one, and they start down the cafeteria line. "No, don't take that, it's gross. Unless you like squishy noodles. The chicken is okay. Most of the veggies aren't bad, except the green beans, avoid those."

"This reminds me of being in college," he says as he fills his tray, "not in a good way. I went to a school with fairly bad food."

"The Shatterdome is more interesting than a college campus," she says with a laugh, leading him to a mostly unoccupied table. "Where did you go?"

"University of Edinburgh for my undergrad and grad studies, I did most of my graduate work at Berkeley until the kaiju came through..." He closes his eyes and shakes his head slightly. "Finished it at MIT and got snapped up by J-Tech before the ink was dry on my degree. I've been programming Jaegers ever since then." Avery hasn't known him long, and he doesn't seem to be very emotive, but she thinks he looks haunted when he opens his eyes again. 

"Were you in Berkeley on K-Day?" she asks, and his eyes widen. "It's a good reason to be so focused on Jaegers. Fighting back."

"I saw Trespasser out of my living room window," he says, almost too quietly to be heard in the noise of the cafeteria. "It was terrifying. I'd never seen something so huge, so alien. By the time they nuked it, it had moved far enough away that I didn't get killed, but between the kaiju and the mushroom cloud..." He shudders. She reaches across the table to cover his chilly hand with hers, and he looks down at their hands, slightly bemused. "I don't usually talk about it."

"I did ask. Oh, Severin, that sounds terrible. And now you're working in a Shatterdome, right on the front lines."

"I'm here for you," he reminds her. "My coding I can do anywhere, but getting you Drifting is why I'm here in Sydney." They lapse into quiet while they finish eating, but as they leave the cafeteria Avery can't keep the question in any more.

"If you're not a pilot, what's the point of getting me Drifting? You're the only one I'm soulmarked to. I can't be a pilot without you." 

"I'm working on the Mark 4 coding now," he says. "They're building it not too far from where you grew up, actually. The system's gone totally digital, and it's going to require extensive testing to be ready for combat." He glances at her, then refocuses on navigating the institutionally-indistinguishable corridors. "Perhaps being a test pilot isn't what you're aspiring to, but it's the best I can give you, I'm afraid."

"Oh..." She bites her lip, falling slightly behind his longer strides, and thinks about it. She wants to fight kaiju, wants to put her training to use, wants the danger and the glory and the savage beauty of it. But this morning she thought she'd never make it into a conn-pod, and what he's offering her is far more than nothing at all. "Well, let's make sure we can even Drift before we start making plans," she says, and he looks back over his shoulder at her, that slight smile lifting his lips.

"We can," he says confidently. "It's not a question of possibility. It's a question of proficiency. We may not Drift well, but I assure you that we will Drift. And we'll get better at it if we don't start off particularly well."

"Part of your job?" she asks, and he stops in front of a door with a post-it note reading _Dr. S. Breckenridge_ stuck in the center and turns to face her.

"The Drift improves with the bond between those Drifting," he says, reaching for her hand. "We hardly know each other yet, but... well, I don't know how you feel about it, but I'm rather thrilled to have just met my soulmate, and I'd like to get to know you."

"I'm an open book," she says, "ask me anything." He nods, opens the door onto an office full of boxes, and gives her hand a gentle tug to invite her in. "Christ, your hands are freezing, are you always this cold?"

"I'm afraid so," he says, "I tend to run about a degree cooler than average."

"Really? I tend to run two warmer, but I guess that's one in Celsius. I'll just have to warm you up, huh?" She steps closer and pauses. "Can I hug you? Is that too forward?"

"I'll allow it," he says, amused, and she slides her arms around his waist and settles her head against his shoulder, her breath warm against his neck. He holds her in return, his hands spread wide on her shoulder blades, and after a moment his tense posture eases a bit.

“You smell nice,” she murmurs, “like tea and cloves. Really nice.” He takes a sharp breath as she noses against his neck, and she grins. “Are you ticklish?”

“If I say no, will you never try to tickle me?”

“Nah, I’m still gonna try. Might as well be honest.” 

“In that case… yes, I’m ticklish, please don’t tickle me. It’s unpleasant.” 

“Fair enough,” she says, gives him a squeeze and lets him go. “You’re reserved. That’ll take some getting used to.”

“Funny, I was thinking the same thing about how gregarious you seem to be,” he says dryly, “although they do say opposites attract. I should have paid more attention.”

“I’m sure we’ve got things in common,” she says, looking around the office and noticing the neat labels on the boxes. “Although it looks like you’re more organized than I am, too…”

“Some might say compulsively so, although that tends to break down when I’m actually working. I’m something of a workaholic.” He lifts a box labeled unpack first out of the pile and sets it on his desk, and she takes the opportunity to study him a bit. Taller than her by a few inches, very skinny, pale but with lots of freckles scattered everywhere she can see, all over his face, down his neck, on the backs of his hands. Ginger hair neatly trimmed, but the kind of askew that comes from hands being run through it. Angular features, very pointy nose, thin and chapped-looking lips. He looks tired, deep shadows under his storm-green eyes, and she wonders if he can see her weariness as clearly as she can see his.

“I really hope we don’t drive each other crazy,” she says, only half joking, and he quirks an eyebrow at her. “I’m halfway there already and you look like you’re on the road.”

“You have no idea,” he says, “but you’ll get one soon enough, I suppose.” The first things he unpacks are an electric kettle and a couple of mugs, one with pi written all over it, the other with the University of Edinburgh logo. “If you’ll direct me to the nearest sink, I’ll make us both a cup of tea.”

“I don’t drink tea,” she says, and the look he gives her is nothing short of dumbfounded. “No, I’m kidding. God, your face! Yeah, c’mon, I’ll show you.”

“If you’re trying not to drive me crazy, you’re doing a bang-up job of it already,” he tells her, and she grins at him, totally unabashed. “You like to tease, don’t you.”

“Guilty as charged. Please tell me you’re not always serious.”

“More often than not.” He shrugs, adding, “I never really learned how to be playful.”

“Willing to learn?”

“I have a feeling it’s going to be necessary,” he says, and she nods, reaching for his free hand.

“Here, let’s get that tea started and we can get to work,” she says. “Got a ways to go before we can begin.”

“Perhaps we’ve already begun,” he says, and squeezes her hand as she leads him out of the office.


End file.
